OK, I’m rendering my episode zero, the Tartakovsky Microseries episode, now. I’m calling it DARK FORCE RISING as above. The full episode runs to about 56 minutes. That should be uploaded about four hours after posting this.

As above, it is Muunilinst/Yavin/Hypori, minus Dirge and the lancers, minus Ventress’ cat disguise (the cat is now someone else), plus Dooku training Grievous.

I ended up reordering it more than expected, to make it a bit of a tighter narrative, as follows:

After Yoda concludes his narration by mentioning that Anakin’s special, we cut directly to Anakin’s dream about being kid Ani with Qui-Gon. In the original there was no context for this dream, and where it is now there’s still very little context, except that for the viewer it kind of ominously sets up this episode and the rest of the Clone Wars. I also moved it up front as a way of starting the episode and the Clone Wars with saying goodbye to child Anakin and Qui-Gon, a kind of “we’re moving forward from TPM/AOTC.” That might not totally work but it didn’t totally work where it was anyway, so I don’t really mind.
After Palpatine sends Anakin and the clone army off to war, we cut straight into Dooku finding Ventress. Now all of the military prep happens at the same time as Dooku training Ventress, so it’s less like he just met her in the arena and then immediately sent her off to kill Anakin. We then cut to more army prep, then more Ventress prep, before we kick off properly. It just feels a bit better paced this way.
Then into Muunilinst, with some slight reordering so there’s less intercutting. We get a bit more space battle than before, then the landing on the planet right the way through to victory, then back to the space battle for Ventress’ arrival and we follow that plotline right through Yavin.
The prior scenes originally were split by Ventress’ introduction, but now I use that break to introduce Grievous being trained by Dooku (but not the later half of that scene with Sidious). This does take away the slow reveal of Grievous in the later Hypori plot, BUT it achieves two things: Firstly, in this training Dooku actually teaches Grievous “you must break them before you defeat them”, and then it makes Grievous’ stealthy fearful introduction a demonstration of him following that advice, so it’s still impactful. And secondly, it’s a cool scene, and since this ‘chunk’ of Tartakovsky is the only part I consider necessary for my Quality Cut (that is, I’m not recommending people watch any other parts of Tartakovsky if they want context for the CG clone wars), I wanted to get that initial setup for “I’ve been trained in your Jedi arts by Count Dooku.”
I moved the shot of Yoda having an “oh shit” meditation moment to right after Anakin’s just completed his rage-fueled attack on Ventress. Now in context, he’s reacting to feeling the darkness rise in Anakin. A viewer could choose to imply that it’s this feeling which compels him to agree to Knight Anakin and later grant him a Padawan, in the hopes of keeping him on the right path.
We then get all of Hypori uninterrupted, then all of the original endings to this section of the miniseries. This takes us through Anakin’s Knighting, Anakin and Padmé’s secret meeting, C-3PO’s golden paint job, and Anakin flying off with his new haircut. I then cap this off with the scene which originally ended the first half of the microseries, where Yoda ruminates about the rising darkness as thunder storms overhead.

The original is a bit of a mash up, aggregating the original three minute long clips often with quick transitions and abrupt audio cuts. I’ve tried to smooth that where possible, and tried to make my own transitions as clean as possible, but the one cut of my own that stands out to me as still a bit jarring I’m going to allow for now since the original permitted things like that too.

This episode isn’t wrapped in my usual TCW:Refocused trappings, because it does kind of stand alone. I added my own credit and Tackel’s for the upscaling, but didn’t touch it otherwise.

Since I’m in the zone I’m just quickly going to put together the cut scenes from this half of the microseries now, those being Dantooine/Mon Calamari/Ilum, which I’ll call ‘TALES FROM THE CLONE WARS’ as part of my Continuity Cut.
(As a reminder: My main edit is the ‘Quality Cut’, which contains my recommended content and viewing order, but the ‘Continuity Cut’ is extra stuff for those who want every single nugget that ties in to wider canon but that doesn’t utterly suck.)