Isn't the "movie" actually the pilot episode of the show? I thought they just decided to prep the pilot for the big screen to generate more hype, and to charge ten bucks a ticket instead of letting people see it for free. It is not like it is a movie that spawned a TV show. We had been hearing about the TV show for the longest time, the idea of putting a couple of pasted together episodes on the big screen came later. Another example of this is Battlestar Galactica (original, not the remake). Here in the states the first few episodes aired on TV just like the rest of the show, but in the UK they decided to give it a theatrical run first. Now you can go into Best Buy and by the "movie" Battlestar Galactica, advertised on its own box as something along the lines of "The movie that started it all..." which is bs, because when you look back on it, there never really was a movie, it was a TV pilot from start to finish. Just because the UK were given a TV pilot to be passed off as a movie and were made to pay for it in theaters, doesn't make it any more of a movie; it just makes it a TV pilot that was given a theatrical release.

Clone Wars is pretty much the same thing, only this time the theatrical TV pilot was released worldwide, not just the UK. Without the "movie" you don't know the circumstances to which Ashoka became Anakin's apprentice, of course the "movie" is part of the series. Of course, you can't judge an entire series by its first epsiode. While I have only heard negative things about the theatrical feature, I have heard lots of good things about the series. I watched a few episodes, and though it is rather juvenile for my taste, it seems fairly well done. I would have loved for there to have been something like this set in the SW universe when I was a kid, no doubt it would have been my favorite cartoon.