Lit What did you think the Clone Wars were going to be before you saw the prequels?

I'm reading the Thrawn trilogy again and noticing some of the little things in there that were invalidated by the prequels (like the notion that the clones in the Clone Wars were fighting against the Republic).

It just made me wonder... how did all of y'all imagine the Clone Wars back before we saw it on film? I didn't discover Star Wars until the same year Episode I came out so I didn't have a lot of time to wonder about it. The only theory I had was that the Mandalorians would be the villains, but that was just because they released an early pic of Jango Fett before explaining who he was.

How about you? Especially those of you who were there when this was first mentioned back in 1977?

 

I thought it had something to do with jedis being cloned or something

 

Mandalorians versus Jedi

I appreciate that this Nov/Dec 1997 Cinescape magazine accurately got Jango Fett's color scheme down five years ahead of time.

 

Sounds like the premise of the mother of all slash fics.

 

Jedi Knights vs clone Mandalorians

...well, that's how it ended, anyway, so not too shabby.

 

The Mandalorian Wars should have been the Clone Wars. An army of invading Mandos, the Jedi refusing to step in, a rogue group of Revanchists led by a guy named Obi-Wan defying the council... the war should have started before Episode I. The Mandos are pretty oversaturated now, but in 1999 they hadn't really come into play at all. I didn't know what the Clone Wars would be, but I thought for sure they would involve the Mandos.

 

Obi-Wan defying the council? Wouldn't that work better with Anakin?

 

"Was I any different when you taught me?"

 

I always appreciated that.

But more pointedly, Revan falls to the dark side, so it seems a bit more appropriate that Anakin would hold that role rather than Obi-Wan.

 

I thought the clones would be some kind of ugly monsters from space controlled by some Dark Side wizard, like Lord of the Rings.

And either:

1) The Emperor in ROTJ was a dictator that DID NOT controlled the clone wars and was geniunelly threatened by the Dark Lord but saw a chance to gain power when he saw the Republic was winning and Jedi were weakened in the war, convinced Vader to seize control and became the new Dark Lord.

2) The evil Dark Side wizard was the Rmperor from ROTJ who abolished the Old Republic by conquering it with his clones and then just crowned himself Emperor.

So to make the long short, I thought the Clone Wars were wars between the Jedi and Republic soldiers and some Dark Side abominations (Clones) created by some Sauron-like being. Also I never expected the Jedi to be an entire army, I expected them to be like a band of 10 or 20 heroes. This to me made more sense, because the OT implied The Force could be harnessed infinitely (size matters not, it is different only in your mind, the ability to destroy a planet is insignificant) and as such a single powerful Force User (like Luke) had the potential to be a threat to a whole Galactic Empire. As such I expected the Jedi to be like some 10 elite heroes of light vs an evil Dark Lord who harnessed the Dark Side to its fullest potential.

 

They aren't?

 

Bingo. Obi-Wan's leading the Revanchists with his sidekick Anakin as his #2. His greatest failure is that he was too close to the dark to stop Anakin from sliding all the way into it. Obi-Wan stopped himself from going too far but was too late to save his best friend.

And no stupid Sith Emperor retcon.

 

In I, Jedi Corran says "Luke went over to save the Galaxy. I imagine Darth Vader did something pretty similar."

Anakin going over for a bit more idealistic reasons than what we got, was what I imagined.

 

Considering how the Emperor called Vader "My Friend" when I thought Clones Were like Space Orcs created by a Dark Side wizard or something that attacked the Republic, actually I imagined something similar to Luke regarding Vader.

That the Emperor and Vader were close friends and like Luke he had to choose between losing his friend(s) (or friend) and go to the Dark Side, then the Emperor got crowned and Vader became his second in command. Albeit I could never make up the idea if the Emperor was the original Dark Lord and conquered the Republic through military might or if he was an important figure in the Republic that took advantadge of the war.

 

I don't remember what I thought the Clone Wars were. Just that they involved clones.

 

I got the AotC sticker book when I was 10, so...

No, I didn't move your cheese.

 

I thought the clones would be the bad guys in the Clone Wars right up until the point that Yoda showed up in a gunship full of clones. This was the depth of my conviction that the clones were the villains.

 

for awhile I thought they were called the "cologne wars" which didn't make much sense so really I didn't know what to think.

 

In 1999 I once got into a debate with a guy who was convinced they said "Colony wars" and not "Clone Wars" in Ep. 4. I'm not even kidding. He was convinced it wasn't "Clone". It was weird.

 

Clone uprising against the Republic

That being said, the multimedia project was an excellent way to flesh the war out, and there were indeed clone uprisings of a sort. I appreciate them taking the time to make canon still fit my childhood vision.

 

I got mine too!

A human bounty hunter, Fett was known for his extremely ruthless methods. He was dressed in a weapon-covered, armored spacesuit, the kind worn by a group of evil warriors defeated by the Jedi Knights during the Clone Wars.

 

I was hoping to perhaps see these:



A Mandalorian dungeon ship used for transporting Jedi in the Clone Wars.

 

Yeah, that was a really cool looking ship design.

I think my earliest impression of the Clone Wars was from Zahn's Thrawn trilogy, and that the Jedi would have been more... how to put it, martial, kind of like elite troops, but enlightened and civilized and all that, a part of the Republic. Tales of the Jedi probably influenced the image of the pre-Dark Times Jedi too. Not to mention the idea that clones would be quick cannon fodder, even if it takes a year to grow them mostly stable, that's still far faster than normal troops. And that the clones would be the enemy the Republic fought against, with the navy and army and whatever.

Of course what we got instead was very different. The Republic having no army, and the clone troopers instead being a case of quality over sheer quantity of droid armies, with the Jedi as reclusive partly hated warrior monks.

As well as the image of Vader as a fallen hero, but instead we got whiny Anakin. Although certain stories have sort of retconned certain details, such as Anakin flying that old spice freighter around in the TCW cartoon, or there was a comic arc where the Confederacy tried growing their own Nikto clones.

And they retconned the Noghri homeworld disaster from just a ship crashing onto a planet and wrecking the environment to that ship carrying a deadly poison that was meant to be deployed against the Republic or something like that.

Don't think any of the earlier works mentioned Palpatine controlling both sides, but most early EU works did know Palpatine was probably manipulating a lot of events, going from Senator to Emperor Palpatine (since the title of Supreme Chancellor hadn't been introduced yet).