Dave Filoni, the man overseeing numerous Star Wars animated projects for Lucasfilm, has revealed that Star Wars: The Clone Wars was originally more like Star Wars Rebels.
The news that The Clone Wars is going to be brought back to life for one final season after years away was jubilant news to fans around the world. Rebels is the series that succeeded The Clone Wars as Lucasfilm’s flagship animated product but it turns out that the former was at one point quite similar to what the latter turned out to be.
Speaking at San Diego Comic-Con (via Cinema Blend), Filoni revealed: “That was something that when I was working early on with Henry Gilroy, we were trying to figure out what the character makeup of the show was going to be and how we could produce a TV series based in the time of the Clone Wars because the Clone Wars is so vast and would require literally thousands of clones battling thousands of battle droids, and so we were shooting around more of an original trilogy idea of a crew, two Jedi that worked with these smugglers and black market. And we were coming up with a character makeup. Frankly, that character makeup is very similar to what we ended up with in Rebels. It just goes to show you that those ideas don’t really die.”
Filoni went on to explain the reason why The Clone Wars changed its approach: “When we took this idea in to George [Lucas], he looked at me, he was like ‘Mmm.’ So Anakin Skywalker is going to be doing this and Obi-Wan Kenobi’s going to be doing this, and we just never presumed that we would be working with those characters. Because my idea was who am I to write Anakin Skywalker? That’s a hugely important character. But George was like, ‘Well, I’m going to teach you all about this.’ And he did. So we wound up with the show we did under his direction.”
It’s certainly interesting to think about what The Clone Wars could have been if they had stuck with original makeup for the show. Things, of course, turned out rather well for both series in the end.
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Are you looking forward to the return of The Clone Wars? Let us know in the comments below…
Originally published August 1, 2018. Updated August 2, 2018.
