The Best Star Wars Since 1983 Has All Been on the Small Screen

At the start of the month I finally got around to signing up for Disney+.  I had thought about it before but then I saw a Hulu ad saying I could add it and ESPN+ to my existing subscription for $7 more so it seemed like a decent price.  And I didn't really have anything on Hulu or Amazon I was keen on watching.

The upshot is I finally got to catch up on Star Wars TV shows I hadn't been able to watch.  First I watched The Mandalorian and I loved it.  The thing is, the story itself is pretty much a cliche.  There are tons of movies where an assassin has been around a while but goes rogue when asked to kill a kid or a woman--or both.  That was what set The Bourne Identity in motion as just one example.  But one of those things you can talk about with writing is that you don't need to reinvent the wheel; you just need to make the wheel seem not as used.  So you take the shopworn tale of an assassin finding a conscience and going rogue, make that assassin a Boba Fett-looking dude and then make the child he saves a baby Yoda creature and you have screen magic.  And other than books, we'd never really gotten to see anything in the post-Empire era between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, so it was nice to finally have something in that time frame.

After that I watched Star Wars Rebels, which I'd never really gotten a chance to watch.  I saw the first episode at Michael Offutt's house and I caught one or two others either on Sling or at my mom's house but most of the time I didn't have access to Disney XD or whatever so I could finally catch up.  That was for the most part a good show.  It kind of picked up where The Clone Wars left off in that while it was a cartoon and the computer graphics were not very real looking, it wasn't silly or stupid.  Of course it wasn't extremely dark and gritty either because it was on a Disney channel, but like Clone Wars it managed to be grown up enough for adults while not too grown up for kids.  And the best part was it gave us an in-continuity Grand Admiral Thrawn.  Hooray!

I do have one bone to pick with that show and that's that I think it was the origin of all that "running low of fuel" bullshit in The Last Jedi.  Several times the Rebels have to steal "fuel" for their ships.  Which again, smaller ships like fighters or the Ghost it would make sense for them to use some kind of fuel cells, but the big ships it still seems dumb.  It would be extremely impractical for Star Destroyers to run on "fuel" rather than something like fusion.  Imagine how much "fuel" something like Darth Vader's Super Star Destroyer would go through!  And the Death Star had some kind of "reactor" to power it, so why wouldn't ships?

Watching The Mandalorian and Rebels back-to-back there are some common elements (besides typical Star Wars stuff) like the darksaber, blurghs, a Loth-cat that tries to eat Baby Yoda, and the transport Imperial troops show up in near the end of The Mandalorian.  Mandalorian culture also had a fair amount of detail in Rebels and in The Clone Wars before it.

I watched The Clone Wars years ago when it was still on Netflix.  It was the kind of show where it didn't really start out all that great, but as it went on it really started to gel.  Characters like Anakin, Padme, and even Jar-Jar who weren't all that deep or interesting in the movies were able to get fleshed out a lot more in the series.  And then there was Ahsoka Tano who starts out as Anakin's bratty little Padawan but then grows up over the course of the series.  Even the clones became more than just generic troopers.  Some like Rex and Cody developed their own personalities.  The series really was able to take a lot of the concepts of the prequels that seemed dumb or lame and make them work.  Though it's a cartoon and was mostly on Cartoon Network back in the 2000/2010s before moving to Netflix and then Disney+, it wasn't really a show written for little kids.  Like Robotech in the 80s it was a sci-fi cartoon but there was a lot of violence and death and stuff that would probably scare little kids.

The bone I have to pick with The Clone Wars is by the third season they had story arcs that were unnecessarily stretched out.  Like one where they have to break Tarkin and a Jedi out of a prison went on for three episodes when it could have just been one.  Or one where they have to stop some slavers and they had a rescue going and that should have been it, but instead the rescue fails to wring one more episode out of it.  Or one where R2D2 and some droids have to steal something from the Separtists which should have just been a wacky little episode went on for 4 episodes!  They should have just got the stuff and gone home and made it a happy little diversion instead of a drawn-out storyline.  That's always something to remember in writing:  don't make things too long if you don't have to.

The other difference between Clone Wars and Rebels is that Rebels focused on a small group of...Rebels, while Clone Wars was far more free-wheeling with its storytelling.  The first episode after the movie focused on Yoda and 3 clones, not Anakin, Obi-Wan, or Padme.  That was the tone set for the rest of the series, where sometimes you might not see a main character for four or five episodes in a row as a story focused on one or two main characters--or none at all.  In writing, Clone Wars was like an old-fashioned omniscient 3rd person POV that cuts to lots of characters while Rebels was more of a limited 3rd person POV.

So the thing is that as the title of the entry says, the best Star Wars since the original three movies has all been on the small screen.  And I think there are a couple of reasons for that.  First off, the TV shows don't have to try to be Star Wars movies.  And by that I mean they don't have to be a big flashy 2 1/2-hour spectacle.  They don't have to try to match the original trilogy in awe and wonder.  Which brings me to the second point that the series can go slower and actually develop stories and characters.  They could probably have made The Mandalorian into a 2 1/2-hour movie, but it also wouldn't have been as good.  For one thing because the producers would want to make everything bigger and flashier and tie it to some big event and so on.  Because it's a Star Wars movie so we have to pull out all the stops!  But a series can stretch its legs and grow better.  That's why The Clone Wars is so much better than the prequel movies were.

The most recent trilogy of movies were so concerned with trying to live up to the originals that they couldn't really cobble together much of a coherent story.  As three 8-episode TV seasons they probably could have done a better job with it to build characters and the setting instead of just throwing together shit that was supposed to remind us of the movies we grew up with.

Anyway, maybe it's time they just forget about the movies and focus on TV.  I mean, except for the billions of dollars the movies make.