I don’t think this show saved Anakin, yet alone the prequels. This show is too silly. I find it ironically amusing when people say this show saved the prequels, when it has the exact same issues. Awful droid humor, jar jar episodes, Anakin is still excessively obsessive and weird with Padme (think about that one episode where he gives Padme his lightsaber in the office and his demanding and immature attitude), the tone is all over the place, Anakin is easily duped to evil ( think about Mortis trilogy, he becomes evil because the evil son showed him in the future that he will be evil and thinks being evil in the present will stop him from being evil in the future, RIDICULOUS). And even the parts of the show that are good like Maul, are ridiculous when you think about it… Maul literally parades around with no genitalia. It’s absolutely absurd and I wish this wasn’t considered “canon.” Even though I only really count the OT as canon since SW has been retconned into oblivion.
Nothing can save the prequels. They are done. They exist. If you don’t like them then try to focus on the original prequel ideas that exist in the ROTJ novel and Thrawn trilogy, as rare as the details are.
That being said if Ihad to revisit Lucas’ prequels I read Darth Plagueis and ROTS NOVEL…
Yeah it’s overrated even by itself. The animation style has this weird floaty, weightless quality that keeps any of the action from having impact.
When you watch the show people have these charts where they tell you what episodes to skip and which arcs are good because they’re so hit or miss. It seems like a lot of the popularity comes from memes about “heh wow this is so dark for a kids show, they’re doing war crimes right now.” Okay, it’s dark for a kid’s show. You showed very light, bloodless versions of people getting tortured and soldiers dying in combat. And? Does that make it good?
Not to mention nothing matters. The show was created after everyone had already seen Revenge of the Sith. There is no tension at all because we know how everything ends already and we know exactly who lives and who dies, even down to the minor background characters and almost every villain. Oh no, our heroes are captured for the 30th time, just like every other episode! Will they make it to the movies to do all the stuff we already saw them do?
The closest it goes to patching the prequels somewhat is adding a little bit of information about Sifo Dyas that goes nowhere, and adding the brain chips to the clones to further explain Order 66. But the chips are only patching a problem that the show itself introduced, making the clones all sympathetic characters that wouldn’t betray the Jedi on their own.
I don’t know about you but for me, if I have to skip episodes in order to enjoy a show, that means it’s not a very good show. No one says to skip Breaking Bad episodes, Sopranos episodes, Game of Thrones episodes, Avatar Last Airbender episodes, etc. etc.
If you were to tell someone to watch this show starting from Season 1 I’ll wager more than half would quit just based off the first episode with Yoda and the clones and that insufferable droid humor.
To be fair there are a lot of hit or miss shows that are still really good, especially when they have full TV seasons of 20 or so episodes. There are watch orders for Star Trek TNG or Deep Space Nine for example, and TNG season 1 is considered really rough. There are episodes of Avatar that people hate that they probably skip on rewatches. Game of Thrones famously ended poorly in its later seasons.
However I think with The Clone Wars it’s just worse overall. The story is all divided up into arcs and it’s a sort of anthology show that jumps around in the timeline and doesn’t focus on any particular narrative thread. If you have a bad arc then it’s a string of 3-4 episodes that all go down. If you have a good arc it can get ruined by a boring episode in the middle. You don’t just skip episodes, you skip whole characters like Jar Jar and Padme. There are a bunch of episodes that focus on side characters who aren’t particularly interesting, and you’re just waiting for Obi Wan and Anakin to come back.