New Star Wars cartoon - SW Rebels - is quite good!

[Dominic]

"Who is that kid?!"
"What happened out there?" "He did."

Are you fucking kidding me? Really?

That obligates the character to die (which Disney is unlikely to follow through on) before Episode 4.

(Never mind how stupid the line itself is.)

Really though, "teenage girl graffiti artist Mandalorian" is where I had to draw the line and say "I'm done".

Oh hell no.

I am tempted to get back in to "Star Wars" for this just so I can be driven off again. (I have no idea what *that* idea appeals to me.)

[BWprowl]

Oh hell no.

I am tempted to get back in to "Star Wars" for this just so I can be driven off again. (I have no idea what *that* idea appeals to me.)

Just wait until you meet the grizzled, sarcastic smuggler with a heart of gold and the spunky Astromech droid with major 'tude! All of them being pursued by a mysterious agent of the Sith known only as "The Inquisitor"!

I wish I'd gotten to sit in on the focus groups that composed each one of these characters.

Seriously Dom, find the trailer on YouTube and watch it, you'll laugh as hard as you'll cringe.

On the positive side, The Clone Wars being done and moving onto this instead, as well as the new movies taking the route of being sequels to the Original Trilogy seems to indicate that we can *finally* just be done with the Prequels as a setting!

EDIT: Also, if this series doesn't end with Many Bothans Dying, it'll be a complete waste.

[Tigermegatron]

I saw and didn't like the SW episodes I,II & III,Theatre movies. I could never watch the newer SW cartoons that takes place in the Episodes I,II & III era. As it returns me to the mediocre terrible settings of the prequels.

Plus,I don't care for the weird art style the newer SW cartoons use for the humanoids.

[Dominic]

Just watched the trailer and the preview.

The music in the preview is like cargo-cult Williams. (Seriously. Why the hell does the music have to be a watered down variant of the movie soundrack, rather than something stylistically similar but otherwise new?)

The trailer was cringe-inducing. Awfult Lucas dialogue instead of using visuals to economically convey story information? Yup. Focus grouped characters? Yup. Obligatory appearance by movie characters (R2D2 and C3PO)? Yup.

Ya gotta love how "Rebels" takes a scene that was cut from Episode III (Luminara's death during the Order-66 montage) and makes it a plot-point. Because, apparently, if a Jedi did not die on screen, they did not die. I can see a few getting away (mostly through luck), but the survival rate (especially for named minor characters) just keeps going up.

[Almighty Unicron]

Just watched the trailer and the preview.

The music in the preview is like cargo-cult Williams. (Seriously. Why the hell does the music have to be a watered down variant of the movie soundrack, rather than something stylistically similar but otherwise new?)

The trailer was cringe-inducing. Awfult Lucas dialogue instead of using visuals to economically convey story information? Yup. Focus grouped characters? Yup. Obligatory appearance by movie characters (R2D2 and C3PO)? Yup.

Ya gotta love how "Rebels" takes a scene that was cut from Episode III (Luminara's death during the Order-66 montage) and makes it a plot-point. Because, apparently, if a Jedi did not die on screen, they did not die. I can see a few getting away (mostly through luck), but the survival rate (especially for named minor characters) just keeps going up.

To be perfectly fair, it logically follows that jedi should be hard to kill.

[JediTricks]

Not a fan of the Thrawn series. It had too many contrivances for my liking. ("While running from the Empire, Luke finds himself captured by pirates. Hilarity ensues when the same Imperials that were chasing Luke stop by the pirates' hideout to solicit a bribe. Things get even crazier when one of the pirates turns out to be an assassin whose sole purpose in life is to kill Luke! Can Luke Skywalker get out of this one, maybe with a little help from the force?")

Luke was a pretty big deal, it wasn't terribly surprising that he'd eventually come across people who wanted to kill him after ROTJ. And Thrawn's Imperial forces didn't randomly come across Karde and his crew, they were HUNTING LUKE SKYWALKER and it led them to that sector. That's not coincidence, that's linear. As for Mara Jade, tracking down enemy-of-her-boss Luke Skywalker was one of the things she had to do, it wasn't her sole purpose. I eyeroll in your general direction.

Here's the thing, this show doesn't feel anything like the post-Ep 3 content out there to me, this feels entirely different and thank goodness for that. This is as unlike Quinlan Vos' survival as it gets in tone, although I suppose on the surface there are similarities.

There is no way to know until "Rebels" ends.

Really, you can't just take it from the way he's presented when we meet him, you have to be entirely sure his whole arc plays out differently first? I'm gauging the character based on the movie, an episode, AND A NOVEL, and I'm telling you that it's not that similar in tone - instead of waiting to see if they bend him to that, despite no evidence they will and an entirely different storytelling staff, you could look into it yourself... or you could just make a snap judgement based on no direct knowledge.

But, SW no longer has the credibility needed for me to stick around and find out. If nothing else, if Dark Horse (licensing from Lucas Film) was not going to kill Vos (and actually had him survive in the stupidest way possible), then I have real doubts that any of the main characters in "Rebels" (including a Jedi?!?!?) are going to be killed off before Episode 4 "happens".

You mean the same Dark Horse that isn't involved with Star Wars storytelling anymore, that Dark Horse? I assume that these characters won't die at the end of the series, that they won't succeed at being great Jedi because they're incomplete and they'll just drift off to an unimportant storytelling position in a different corner of the galaxy. Then again, they did just raise their visibility to the Empire quite a bit, maybe it'll conclude with Ezra or Kanan getting iced and the others carrying on in their name, fighting the good fight, making little dents and running little missions against the Empire.

"Dark Times" got it thematically right, even if they execution was off in places. Any Jedi that survived Order 66 (through luck or aggression) had 3 choices: -suicidal last stand, guerilla tactics or just quitting. The first two options obligate the character to die.

Quit is what Kanan did, until he found something worth trying again. A New Dawn makes a big point of his mindset earlier in his life about this, how he's not ready to pull the lightsaber out of the pouch and reassemble it yet, and he tries to hide his abilities at all costs.

I got in to Ostrander's run on "Star Wars" with the assumption that the books had a sunset provision (Episode III) and that most of the characters were going to die. The only main character from Ostrander's run (as "main" as a character from a tie-in book can be) to die was Secura. And, *that* was only because she died on-screen in the movie. As soon as I saw that Vos' death got cut from the movie, I started worrying that Dark Horse would back-pedal.

You do know Vos was in Episode I as a background nothing and they just co-opted him into the stories, right? So um, yeah, not exactly earning huge points there either.

The fact that Tano survived "Clone Wars" at all makes me doubt that Disney will let "Rebels" end correctly.

Disney had nothing to do with that decision.

I saw the preview for this a couple weeks back and was amazed at how bad I thought it looked. Everything looks so painfully generic and by-the-book and safe. I especially love our scrappy everyboy hero who's not destined for greatness at all.

"Who is that kid?!"
"What happened out there?" "He did."

Seriously? It oughta be illegal to write lines like that in this day and age.

Really though, "teenage girl graffiti artist Mandalorian" is where I had to draw the line and say "I'm done".

Oh, I get it! When Obi-Wan's recording mentions 'A New Hope', that's THE NAME OF THE MOVIE! Four stars, cartoon of the year.

Thanks for the douchiest, most surface way of looking at it. You are entitled to judge based on the smallest amount of information possible, but holy crap did you take that entitlement seriously and use it to shit on everything I said. For someone who constantly bemoans the lack of new things, maybe the problem isn't the new things you come across, perhaps the issue is that you are looking for something you haven't seen yet while ignoring that virtually nothing in life is created in a vacuum, whole-cloth.

Ezra is a bit of a twat, he's not destined for greatness, we in fact know he's going to flame out because we don't hear his name in the movies so Filoni has to rectify the existence of the character with pre-existing material, it's one of his directives.

Star Wars has always had corny dialogue, but the fact that you pulled one line out of context and then shit on it and held that snark up as evidence that the storytelling is bad, that's lazy criticism. And Star Wars has always had repeating dialogue and touches, that's not something new.

There was nothing offensive about Sabine aside from "girl in Mando armor" teen fanwank, but guess what, you put almost anything from Star Wars in here and it'll come off as pandering because Star Wars casts a wide net, it has significant reach. So they're trying to appeal to a younger audience, but there's an actual character in there beyond just a simple gimmick, which you don't care about since you made your snap judgement.

Just wait until you meet the grizzled, sarcastic smuggler with a heart of gold and the spunky Astromech droid with major 'tude!

2 of my favorite characters, but at least you got to feel like a big shot by breaking it down to the shallowest level. Never mind that Chopper the cobbled-together astromech is the willful housecat to R2-D2's faithful dog. Never mind that Kanan isn't a smuggler and isn't that grizzled and is carrying an emotional darkness which may swallow him up as he struggles to care about something bigger than himself. They are easily pigeonholed to justify your pre-opinion, so let's spread that on toast!

I saw and didn't like the SW episodes I,II & III,Theatre movies. I could never watch the newer SW cartoons that takes place in the Episodes I,II & III era. As it returns me to the mediocre terrible settings of the prequels.

This isn't prequel-era.

Just watched the trailer and the preview.

The music in the preview is like cargo-cult Williams. (Seriously. Why the hell does the music have to be a watered down variant of the movie soundrack, rather than something stylistically similar but otherwise new?)

Gee, I dunno, because that music has been out of Star Wars for 30 years and needs to return to grab audiences, to help set the tone of something new? Williams' prequel scores are all "new" and they're all off-base, the second and third prequel actually sound grotesquely like Harry Potter films.

The trailer was cringe-inducing. Awfult Lucas dialogue instead of using visuals to economically convey story information? Yup. Focus grouped characters? Yup. Obligatory appearance by movie characters (R2D2 and C3PO)? Yup.

You watched the trailer or the preview? The preview has no R2 and 3PO. There is no dialogue written by Lucas for these, this is the first non-Lucas created Star Wars screen media ever, essentially. But yeah, it will sound similar to Star Wars, that's how it fucking goes when you're a spin off of Star Wars. And you watched a TRAILER, of course there was no time to "economically convey story information", there was no story to tell, it's a trailer. The characters may be meant to appeal to a wider audience, although it seems odd to claim that when the characters are targeting SPECIFIC groups, but they were created by the Star Wars storygroup and Filoni, Kinberg, Greg Weisman, not a focus group.

Ya gotta love how "Rebels" takes a scene that was cut from Episode III (Luminara's death during the Order-66 montage) and makes it a plot-point. Because, apparently, if a Jedi did not die on screen, they did not die. I can see a few getting away (mostly through luck), but the survival rate (especially for named minor characters) just keeps going up.

Watch the episode before you jack yourself all the way off with that self-congratulation.

To be perfectly fair, it logically follows that jedi should be hard to kill.

Huh, that's a funny thought, mystical wizard warrior monks are hard to kill, who'da thunk?

[Dominic]

To be perfectly fair, it logically follows that jedi should be hard to kill.

The whole point of Order 66 is that most of 'em got aced in the span of an hour or so though. I can buy in to some surviving. But, the survival rate is climbing too high. (It started almost immediately after Episode III.)

Luke was a pretty big deal, it wasn't terribly surprising that he'd eventually come across people who wanted to kill him after ROTJ. And Thrawn's Imperial forces didn't randomly come across Karde and his crew, they were HUNTING LUKE SKYWALKER and it led them to that sector. That's not coincidence, that's linear. As for Mara Jade, tracking down enemy-of-her-boss Luke Skywalker was one of the things she had to do, it wasn't her sole purpose. I eyeroll in your general direction.

All that stuff happens with those people at once, at the same time? Luke just happens to be picked up by pirates who just happen to have Jade as a member of their crew.....

There are people who I have known for years that I live within a few blocks of that I am less likely to run into.

Really, you can't just take it from the way he's presented when we meet him, you have to be entirely sure his whole arc plays out differently first?

It is not tone. It is a question of me not trusting SW to do it right this time when they have have not done so in the past. (You might not understand just how much the end of Ostrander's run pissed me off.)

You mean the same Dark Horse that isn't involved with Star Wars storytelling anymore, that Dark Horse?

Sorry, my post was not clear.

The point is that if pre-Disney "Star Wars" did not kill Vos or Tano, there is little reason to expect Disney SW to kill main characters.

You watched the trailer or the preview?

Both.

And, the Lucas (or Lucas-style) dialogue is one of the worst things about SW. I would have conceded that even when I was a fan.

Watch the episode before you jack yourself all the way off with that self-congratulation.

Well, there is a team of rebels led by a Jedi who survived Order 66 and includes a force sensitive who are apparently going to be involved in a plot focusing on Jedi that the Empire has held captive for years. Because.... everything is awesome with Jedi in it.

[JediTricks]

To be perfectly fair, it logically follows that jedi should be hard to kill.

The whole point of Order 66 is that most of 'em got aced in the span of an hour or so though. I can buy in to some surviving. But, the survival rate is climbing too high. (It started almost immediately after Episode III.)

Most of them were with troops they had grown to trust, troops which gunned them down, but not all would have been. The survival rate isn't that high now that all the EU has been wiped out.

Luke was a pretty big deal, it wasn't terribly surprising that he'd eventually come across people who wanted to kill him after ROTJ. And Thrawn's Imperial forces didn't randomly come across Karde and his crew, they were HUNTING LUKE SKYWALKER and it led them to that sector. That's not coincidence, that's linear. As for Mara Jade, tracking down enemy-of-her-boss Luke Skywalker was one of the things she had to do, it wasn't her sole purpose. I eyeroll in your general direction.

All that stuff happens with those people at once, at the same time? Luke just happens to be picked up by pirates who just happen to have Jade as a member of their crew.....

There are people who I have known for years that I live within a few blocks of that I am less likely to run into.

Are your neighbors running freedom-fighter missions all over the country? Are they doing anything to garner attention whatsoever which would increase the odds of running into them? Not likely. This wasn't coincidence, this was the events of the story being noteworthy. Nobody wants to read a book where nothing happens for 5 years until at the end the events finally start happening. A led to B which led to C. There were coincidences like Mara Jade being on that crew and having a beef with Luke, but the way the story got from Thrawn's rise to Luke's encounter with Krarde was more organic than you give it credit for.

It is not tone. It is a question of me not trusting SW to do it right this time when they have have not done so in the past. (You might not understand just how much the end of Ostrander's run pissed me off.)

Disney creating the story group is meant to avoid that sort of thing, and moving comic development in-house to Marvel should tighten that up further.

Sorry, my post was not clear.

The point is that if pre-Disney "Star Wars" did not kill Vos or Tano, there is little reason to expect Disney SW to kill main characters.

They weren't main characters. Disney won't kill live-action main screen characters easily, but Tano and Vos would be fair game - it's risky with Tano because she's the child audience surrogate though.

Both.

And, the Lucas (or Lucas-style) dialogue is one of the worst things about SW. I would have conceded that even when I was a fan.

Ok, but is that a deal-breaker? Was it when you were a fan? I doubt it. It was a foible.

Watch the episode before you jack yourself all the way off with that self-congratulation.

Well, there is a team of rebels led by a Jedi who survived Order 66 and includes a force sensitive who are apparently going to be involved in a plot focusing on Jedi that the Empire has held captive for years. Because.... everything is awesome with Jedi in it.

Yeah, you've pre-determined your opinion without watching the episode and don't even realize there's something far more interesting going on there. You decided it's X and thus it has to fit that viewpoint - if you took the time to view the episode, you'd see it's not what you're making it out to be in the larger sense. If you're at all likely to watch the episode, LMK, otherwise I'll PM you with the explanation.

[138 Scourge]

Star Wars and I are done, so I'll take JT's word that the show's all right and call it good. However. Regarding Order 66. That irritated the hell out of me because, like, aren't the Jedi supposed to be badass psychic space ninja knights? With reflexes that let them block laser blasts and all? Sure, they were surprised and all, but if each Jedi is supposed to be as tough or tougher than Obi-Wan, I would think the survival rate would have been a lot higher.

Even though I'm done with Star Wars, I did watch the Phineas and Ferb Star Wars special, and ended up really digging that. Anyone check that show out?

[Shockwave]

Star Wars and I are done, so I'll take JT's word that the show's all right and call it good. However. Regarding Order 66. That irritated the hell out of me because, like, aren't the Jedi supposed to be badass psychic space ninja knights? With reflexes that let them block laser blasts and all? Sure, they were surprised and all, but if each Jedi is supposed to be as tough or tougher than Obi-Wan, I would think the survival rate would have been a lot higher.

Even though I'm done with Star Wars, I did watch the Phineas and Ferb Star Wars special, and ended up really digging that. Anyone check that show out?

Well sort of. They can sense what's around them, but the problem with order 66, is that most of them were commanding batallions of stormtroopers who were on their side one second and literally trying to kill them the next. It's that sudden shift in their intentions that made it such an effective surprise attack because the Jedi wouldn't sense any murderous intent until it was too late. And, when you're surrounded at point blank range by 20 stormtroopers, yeah, they can deflect a few shots, but even the best Jedi isn't gonna come out of that alive. Obi Wan survived because he wasn't near his troops and was able to escape as a result. Yoda survived because he only had two troopers near him and they were far enough away for Yoda to act before they did. It's also implied that by that point, Yoda could feel what was happening elsewhere which gave him the extra few seconds to react.

It was also implied in the prequels that Jedi reflexes are a result of Jedi being able to see slightly into the future. But, even if this is the case, they can only see a few moments ahead, which wouldn't help them out very much if they're completely surrounded. Also, not every Jedi has the same level of Force sensitivity. Just like any ability, using the Force comes more naturally to some Jedi than others and some are less proficient at it than others. It's not unreasonable to believe that catching one of the less proficient Jedi off guard would be as tough as say, Yoda, who is apparently the most proficient Jedi.