There are two great Star Wars films, several great video games, six and three quarter actual Star Wars films in total, and no series consistent enough to really stand alongside the film's canon. There are also too many books for me to judge, but I consider several to be good, and generally better than most anything else besides the two KOTOR games, and two to be the best works in all of Star Wars.
tl;dr Watch it if you want, but everything that it promises turns to shallow nothingness, and the vast majority of the time it's goofy Saturday morning cartoon little boy protagonist nonsense. If you still liked it at the end, you need a lobotomy enjoy your diet fiction.
Canon is what is good, and it's what you want it to be. The Clone Wars had some nice moments, told some stories that were really interesting for a kid's show, and I love some of the OCs it created. Or at least I used to before they were shoved into everything and used to do ret-cons - . -z . The art style was terrible, but got slightly better. It's still just a cartoon that requires much in the way of grading on a curve. I enjoyed it, but we still haven't [September 2022] gotten a TV series that deserves the Star Wars name. And no, 'Mando doesn't count either, because it ended up doing exactly the same thing this (Rebels) did, and that is to not just be bad all on its own, but to bring down the best of the original, just to serve as a fix-up job for hatchet-job sequels.
That said, while I did at times enjoy the darker tone that it sometimes had (amusingly, whenever they were on-planet and it was literally dark outside), the essence of this show was a kiddie show made to glue middle-schooler eyes to screens advertising toys, and it was an audacious affront to the setup and characters that were given to it by Timothy Zahn, after being tasked to re-write his Thrawn series and character to fit in with nu-canon. While Mary Elizabeth McGlynn is an American voice acting institution, the Arhinda Pryce in this show is a one-dimensional He-Man villain, as opposed to the character that shared main character duty with Thrawn in the first Thrawn prequel re-write.
This show has zero stakes as a general rule, and even if you watched it, wanting to like it, like I did, it will eventually disappoint on everything it teases, with its shallowness and nonsensical story choices, a majority of badly written and annoying characters, and infuriating missed opportunities. It also gets worse after season three, despite what some people say. Mortis was a fun diversion for the actors during TCW, but that's all it should have been, as it completely ruins the idea of the Force, and should have just been Anakin's fever dream, and should have been some race's myth concerning the Force-- not the actual Force itself. I also tried to re-watch the first original Mortis episode, and it's just awful. I remember the conclusion being somewhat better, but the writing of the first episode is so bad I couldn't continue. Here, they double and triple down on it, even bringing in a time travel ret-con, of course, to better serve the completely unplanned Swiss cheese storytelling of the Disney Sequel series, as a completely open-ended 'out' for anything and everything that doesn't make any sense-- also, so Filoni's best girl can continue to show up in everything.
Ezra is an obnoxious DisneyXD little boy protagonist, and it really never gets much better. And when it starts to try to, they make Sabine so ridiculously overtalented and over-accomplished that it's impossible to even try to root for her anymore. There's eventually something that gets set up that would have made him interesting (same thing that should have happened to Rey, but didn't) but they stole it from us, and Ezra continues to be an only slightly less obnoxious MC.
Also: lightsaber helicopters 'kin hell, if there were any doubt about how seriously they took any kind of consistency...
There are about three good characters in this show: Hera, who I love, and who is lekku above most other characters (and I swear must have had a single person assigned just for her facial animation, since it's better than the rest, and Vanessa Marshal brings her to life with depth and pathos, even when she's fussing with that insufferable trash can); Agent Kallus, who is about 10 times more interesting than Pryce, while being about half as interesting as the real Arhinda Pryce from the book; and Ahsoka. There's also a scene with her and one particularly important character on Korriban Moriband that's pretty chill-inducing. At least, it would be, if Ezra hadn't been in the same room, and there hadn't been jackasses with helicopter lightsabers ending the scene.
Review by LNeroBlockedParent2022-09-13T03:18:16Z
There are two great Star Wars films, several great video games, six and three quarter actual Star Wars films in total, and no series consistent enough to really stand alongside the film's canon. There are also too many books for me to judge, but I consider several to be good, and generally better than most anything else besides the two KOTOR games, and two to be the best works in all of Star Wars.
tl;dr Watch it if you want, but everything that it promises turns to shallow nothingness, and the vast majority of the time it's goofy Saturday morning cartoon little boy protagonist nonsense. If you still liked it at the end,
you need a lobotomyenjoy your diet fiction.Canon is what is good, and it's what you want it to be. The Clone Wars had some nice moments, told some stories that were really interesting for a kid's show, and I love some of the OCs it created. Or at least I used to before they were shoved into everything and used to do ret-cons - . -z . The art style was terrible, but got slightly better. It's still just a cartoon that requires much in the way of grading on a curve. I enjoyed it, but we still haven't [September 2022] gotten a TV series that deserves the Star Wars name. And no, 'Mando doesn't count either, because it ended up doing exactly the same thing this (Rebels) did, and that is to not just be bad all on its own, but to bring down the best of the original, just to serve as a fix-up job for hatchet-job sequels.
That said, while I did at times enjoy the darker tone that it sometimes had (amusingly, whenever they were on-planet and it was literally dark outside), the essence of this show was a kiddie show made to glue middle-schooler eyes to screens advertising toys, and it was an audacious affront to the setup and characters that were given to it by Timothy Zahn, after being tasked to re-write his Thrawn series and character to fit in with nu-canon. While Mary Elizabeth McGlynn is an American voice acting institution, the Arhinda Pryce in this show is a one-dimensional He-Man villain, as opposed to the character that shared main character duty with Thrawn in the first Thrawn prequel re-write.
This show has zero stakes as a general rule, and even if you watched it, wanting to like it, like I did, it will eventually disappoint on everything it teases, with its shallowness and nonsensical story choices, a majority of badly written and annoying characters, and infuriating missed opportunities. It also gets worse after season three, despite what some people say. Mortis was a fun diversion for the actors during TCW, but that's all it should have been, as it completely ruins the idea of the Force, and should have just been Anakin's fever dream, and should have been some race's myth concerning the Force-- not the actual Force itself. I also tried to re-watch the first original Mortis episode, and it's just awful. I remember the conclusion being somewhat better, but the writing of the first episode is so bad I couldn't continue. Here, they double and triple down on it, even bringing in a time travel ret-con, of course, to better serve the completely unplanned Swiss cheese storytelling of the Disney Sequel series, as a completely open-ended 'out' for anything and everything that doesn't make any sense-- also, so Filoni's best girl can continue to show up in everything.
Ezra is an obnoxious DisneyXD little boy protagonist, and it really never gets much better. And when it starts to try to, they make Sabine so ridiculously overtalented and over-accomplished that it's impossible to even try to root for her anymore. There's eventually something that gets set up that would have made him interesting (same thing that should have happened to Rey, but didn't) but they stole it from us, and Ezra continues to be an only slightly less obnoxious MC.
Also: lightsaber helicopters
'kin hell, if there were any doubt about how seriously they took any kind of consistency...
There are about three good characters in this show: Hera, who I love, and who is lekku above most other characters (and I swear must have had a single person assigned just for her facial animation, since it's better than the rest, and Vanessa Marshal brings her to life with depth and pathos, even when she's fussing with that insufferable trash can); Agent Kallus, who is about 10 times more interesting than Pryce, while being about half as interesting as the real Arhinda Pryce from the book; and Ahsoka. There's also a scene with her and one particularly important character on
KorribanMoriband that's pretty chill-inducing. At least, it would be, if Ezra hadn't been in the same room, and there hadn't been jackasses with helicopter lightsabers ending the scene.