Star Wars: Clone Wars (2003) – Broadcast Restoration Project

Over the past few months, I’ve been working on restoring and upscaling missing broadcast exclusive footage from Star Wars: Clone Wars (2003), content that never made it into any official home media releases. The goal is to end up with a version of the show that is 100% faithful to what was presented on the original broadcasts.

Using a mix of community sourced TV recordings and modern AI tools, I’ve been able to reconstruct many of these lost segments and bring them up to a quality that blends well with the existing 1080p HD footage.

Huge thanks to Gabindayback, his restoration thread was the inspiration behind this project and a major source of knowledge and material. I originally started posting my own work in his thread, but with this project growing into its own thing, I figured it was time to give it a dedicated space.

You can check out his original thread here - https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Star-Wars-Clone-Wars-Micro-Series-Original-Episode-Format-Restoration-RELEASED/id/109799/page/1

Footage Still Needed

If you have any of the following, or can confirm whether they ever aired, your help would be incredibly appreciated:

* Chapter 10: Missing the outro (“Next time on…” segment)
* Chapters 21–25: I’m looking for intros/outros for any of these. Recently an outro to Chapter 21 has surfaced as well as the general Cartoon Network bumper that was on these episodes.

If you have recordings with these segments (even in rough quality), or if you remember how these episodes aired, feel free to reply or message me directly.

I’ll update with new posts as I continue down this project. I’m currently hard at work on a new version of this project which should be available in the near future.

Neat find…on the Brazilian Portuguese Chapter 7 we’re using to pull the intro segment, I spotted an oddity. The outro just says “Next” instead of “Next Time.”

Every other version of the outro I’ve seen, no matter the language, uses “Next Time.”

Interesting. I only wish somebody would have the .m4v episodes from iTunes. Those remain a mistery.

Considering those were released after the DVDs, I’m curious which versions of the show they would even be. Sadly probably not very useful for my broadcast recreation version with Cartoon Network bumpers, intros and outros.

Nice! I can’t wait to see this coming out! Keep the great work!

Good news everyone, we’ve tracked down all the missing footage from the original airings of Clone Wars! We have it all!

• ✅ The missing outro to Chapter 10 - Got it!
• ✅ The missing intro to Chapter 21 - Got it!
• ✅ The missing intros and outros to Chapters 21–25 - Got it!

I’ll be starting work on restoring the intros and outros this weekend. It’ll take some time, several weeks at least, since I’m only using the free version of Project Starlight for a few shots. I’ll be sure to post updates if I discover anything interesting along the way.

To answer a few questions that might come up:

• The outro to Chapter 10 isn’t a typical “Next Time” segment, it’s actually a promo for Season 2, which aired the following spring in 2004.
• The intro to Chapter 21 also isn’t a standard “Previously” segment, it’s a Season 2 teaser that aired during the Teen Titans end credits, right before a few commercials and the start of Chapter 21.
• Chapters 22–25 do include “Previously” segments, just like Chapters 2–20.
• Chapters 22–24 also have outros, but again, they’re not the usual “Next Time” format, they function more like promos.

In keeping with the spirit of this restoration, I’ll be restoring everything as it originally aired. If folks want to create their own streamlined or alternate versions from this complete restoration, that’s totally fine but this project will serve as a 100% accurate broadcast recreation of how it looked back in the day.

Excited to get started, more updates soon!

I can’t take all the credit for finding the footage. A few dedicated folks helped track down the missing recording and this couldn’t have happened without them.

While filtering through over 200GB of footage, I’ve been working to track down the best possible versions of each shot and the cleanest audio clips for this project. Along the way, I found some really interesting differences between the Clone Wars episodes as they aired and how they were looking in promos. Particularly in the newly discovered promo footage for Season 3 (Chapters 21-25).

I’ve put together a series of image comparisons to highlight these changes. It’s a really interesting look at how the animation evolved to its final broadcast episodes.

The plan is to restore as much of this original promo footage as possible, but time will tell if the upscaled footage is useable. Fingers crossed.

Chapter 10 - Promo

Chapter 21 - Promo

Chapter 22 - Outro

Chapter 24 - Outro

Chapter 21 started without a “previously” intro segment like other episodes. Instead there was a promo for Season 3 during the end credits of Teen Titans which aired right before. Following that a few short commercials and then the episode started with the typical logo intro. I’m going to make three versions of this episode and include an alt versions folder in the next release.

Question for everyone:

Do I include the “Begins Next” Promo in the alt versions folder or the main episodes folder?

If you’d like to see what I’m talking about you can watch how it starts in this YouTube video.

https://youtu.be/YCk8TFhKK74

Currently I’m leaning towards this plan:
No intro Version in the episodes folder (This just starts with the Star Wars Clone Wars logo)
Alt Version Folder Includes:

• Begins Next promo version
• Cartoon Network intro version