how does Labyrinth of Evil and the Clone Wars Cartoon interact?

I haven't read the book but I have the cartoon. I Know they are around the same period so I wondered if they mixed.

 

I think it was something like the book is more canon, and the cartoon series is more like a 3rd party account (think ABC or NBC covering the war in Iraq) or what's going on.

 

The cartoon was loosely based on early draft ideas of LOE.

As it stands, LOE is very precisely a sequence of events leading up to Episode III...the events of "Clone Wars" are a collection of stories from the surrounding timeframe, but not specific to the days just before Episode III...(the only exception being the Palpatine kidnapping, which is close enough to the book to be apologized)

 

Yeah... hot topic, but basically the novel (LoE) had way more oversight to it and is likelier to be "closer to actual events" than the CW cartoon is.

People also dismiss this out of hand, but it's also theorized that the entirety of the CW cartoon is a cartoon series as done by Paxi Lalo (or whatever his name is); the kid in the Mace Windu/Dantooine episodes.

 

I've always liked this as a potential retcon. From the very first time that episode aired (Mace/Dantooine), i thought it was blatantly clear that the entire events of the episode was being told from the viewpoint of Paxi, right down to the "Mean Joe Greene"-esque ending. I always envisioned that the episode was him telling his friends about this battle he saw, with all the appropriate childlike exaggeration as would be expected.

 

The Databank actually explicitly states this, by the way. The hypothetical at that point is that, since the rest of the CW cartoons are stylistically the same as the Dantooine episode -- and Paxi was canonically responsible for the Dantooine episode -- that the rest of the series was just his hyperexaggerated cartoon work. "Thematically correct but dramatically licensed" to the "actual" events.

Of course, there's no 100% supporting canonical statement for that but it makes a ton of sense and it can more easily be argued that this was the case rather than it wasn't, but it really can't be proven 100% either way.

 

The endings are different. The cartoon has Anakin going through his final trial(which is weird because he was knighted in the first episode), while the book has them searching for Dooku. Both lead up right before they make their Palpatine rescue mission.

 

I'm not a real huge fan of that idea. There are moments in the prequel films themselves (particularly ROTS) that are nearly as cartoon-y as the actual cartoons. Disregarding the cartoon as a "retelling" of actual events just makes things more complicated. What about those wacky Droids and Ewoks cartoons, with all their animated hijinxs that often defy the laws of physics? (Even SW physics.)

There's also the Holiday Special cartoon, which was actually presented within the special as an in-universe animated cartoon. It could have easily been disregarded, since there was a comic telling a different version of the "first reveal of Boba Fett", but instead it was accepted into the EU verbatim by later sources.

TC

 

And then there are the parts in the ROTS novel that contradict the cartoon... Like Threepio first getting his golden plating, Anakin giving Padmé his Padawan braid, and Mace reminiscing his fight with General Grievous(which happened in LOE; and not in the cartoon) during the events leading to Palpatine's capture...

In light of these, personally I put the version of events as told in LOE on a higher level.

 

...though when you think about it, those parts in the novel don't contradict the events of the cartoon any more than the novel does the events of the movie...

TC

 

So, basically, everyone's just mucking it up.

 

The best theories were those who attempted to explain this as two different battles and two different kidnapping attempts.
It also doesn't help that there are the same names around in both versions (coming obviously from the same outline), so Anakin's lengthy trial on Nelvaan becomes something quite different in the novel: here, it's a fake destination on Dooku's trip to Coruscant so that he would lose the Jedi. It doesn't seem to work, though, as the novel ends exactly where the movie begins.

I prefer the novel for actual canon and see the cartoon as additional fun, but then again, my idea of canon isn't so strict. Grievous getting his coughing from Mace's assault is a good connection, for example; this doesn't happen in the novel.

I can live with two different stories being told about the same thing. I mean, while it's all SW, you obviously have a movie universe, a novel universe that needs to change some of the movie facts (e.g. Anakin bringing balance, something that forces retcons out of averey new writer, as it seems) and that has special "novel" versions of the film episodes, a comic universe, a game universe and so on. Of course, sometimes these overlap, but I can't think of any place where they were really working closely together. Dark Empire as a distinct episode between Thrawn and Jedi Academy comes to mind (and even here some people are still hoping for a novel to have it as a "true" timeline event), and Clone Wars had several obvious crossreferences between the media, although it still seems to be safe divisions of the story for the media types. Vos and Aayla, for example, never made the jump into the novels besides the witty nametelling.
In the end, I can enjoy watching CW, then EP3; I can enjoy redaing LOE, then watching EP3; and finally, I can also imagine what the story might have been like prior to EP3 from what I make of the pieces. I sometimes even ponder the idea of ten years having passed between ep2 and 3, as it would work really well with the development of characters and design.

PS: Did you know that they've made an LOE audio drama here in Germany? It's using the same voices as the movies (the same applies for CW, by the way), so the novel gets some extra canon points...

 

Yeah, good point.

Apparently

 

Square peg + round hole + sledgehammer = continuity!

 

I dont remember Mace Force crushing Grievous' in the book. How are his coughing fits in RotS explained without this?

 

In the ROTS novelization, there is no mention of GG coughing or having any other problems with his lungs. It seems everything is fine with him.
I don't have the page number, but somewhere along, Mace's fight atop the Maglev train(NOT Grievous' chest being crushed) with Grievous IS mentioned briefly in the novel.

 

Hmmm. So maybe LoE goes along with the other novels and Clone Wars goes with the films. Odd.

 

Uh, there's absolutely no way Paxi was behind anything other than the Dantooine episodes.

 

You're right. It must have been the work of Jeremitt Towani.

 

Please explain. I fail to see how that could be true.

 

>I mean, while it's all SW, you obviously have a movie universe, a novel universe that needs to change some of the movie facts (e.g. Anakin bringing balance, something that forces retcons out of averey new writer, as it seems) and that has special "novel" versions of the film episodes, a comic universe, a game universe and so on. Of course, sometimes these overlap, but I can't think of any place where they were really working closely together. Dark Empire as a distinct episode between Thrawn and Jedi Academy comes to mind (and even here some people are still hoping for a novel to have it as a "true" timeline event),<

Well, that pretty much goes against the whole idea of the Expanded Universe as it now stands. It's all the same universe. Jedi Academy Trilogy tied in with Dark Empire in many ways, such as the depiction of Coruscant, mention of the World Devastators, and the inclusion of Kam Solusar. The connections are all over the place, if you bother to look for and recognize them.

TC

 

If you're thinking knowledge of events, Steven Spielberg wasn't actually at Normandy, but he made a pretty decent movie about it. If Voren can find out about Sidious, Paxi can read up on the Battle of Coruscant and talk with some Nelvaanians.

 

So basically youre saying that Jeremitt Towani has nothing to do with the clone wars cartoon. Damn.

 

With respect to Grey1, I actually think it's easier to argue that the movies have been "edited". My personal POV is that, if you look hard enough at the movies themselves, you can imagine the basic footage as "real" inside the GFFA, but editing cuts and CGI elements often have to be seen as added in during the conversion of the records into a narrative...

For instance, the opening lines of TPM are a heavily cut down version of a longer exchange (preserved, I think, in the novel): "With all due respect for the Trade Federation, the Ambassadors for the Supreme Chancellor wish to board immediately" looks like an oddly stilted hailing address to the Trade Federation ships, but we know from the longer version that it's actually a reply to something Nute said, trying to delay their arrival.

Or, for inconsistencies in CGI, look no further than Coruscant!

- The Imperial Ewok

 

Erm... Yeah, I actually mentioned the connections between JAT and DE being on the better side. Still, in most cases, the "huge canon connections" are simple namedroppings taken from some chronology or your favourite story. Take Kyle Katarn, for example (and don't even start saying that "no-one takes Kyle"... ). Originally, he's a videogame character who's totally seperated from the Big Three. You have Mon Mothma, you have the Death Star, that's it. Then the graphic novels come along, and they need to establish Kyle's story inside the canon of the Big Three (for whatever resons). Which messes up the intensity of the game story. Then, Kyle is mentioned in a few novels - as a bearded generic Jedi Master. You could have left him out, as well. There is a connection, but it's just name-dropping. The stories don't interact with each other. Corran, on the other hand, came out of the "novel universe" and thus created huge interactions with the Big Three storyline although the X-Wing novels were fairly stand-alone. My point is: A novel character could be pushed heavily into the other novels while a game character (or a comic character like Quinlan Vos, for that matter) couldn't. Which has much to do with authors, their preferred media type and their preferred characters.

In the end, it's all POV. And I am fully aware that my POV on the whole EU continuity question is heresy. So what? I'm not saying everyone should stop believeing in the idea of one single canon, I'm just saying what I come up with thinking for myself. Personally, I think retcons are used far too often to replace common sense when it comes to reception of simple media products.