The Clone Wars (2008 animated tv series) - a general discussion thread — Page 10

C3PX said:

Vaderisnothayden said:

Mielr said:

GeorgeLucasIsANarcissist said:

C3PX said:

I can't speak for anybody else, but I absolutely freaken love skyjedi's posts. I think he should have his own late night talk show, because he is awesome.

 

I don't post much, but this is spot-on. Roll on skyjedi. Don't ever change.

I agree- I love Sky's posts! :-)

 

Yeah, I find his posts a breath of fresh air and he says stuff that needs saying.

 

Don't get me wrong, most of sky's posts are just him ranting about the same things over and over, more often than not when reading a discussion you can skip over every one of his posts without missing a beat. He has a lot of knowledge and often has some very interesting insights and facts to share, such as his post about the composer of the Clone Wars music a few posts ago. I can see why a lot of people get annoyed at how often he breaks out into rants, especially since they are so similar to the rant before them, but they are so damn entertaining, it is hard not to be amused by them.

He usually has some incredibly funny sarcastic remarks, or just funny comparisons. All those guys who cannot be bothered with reading the things he posts, or who have added him to their block list, are missing out on some great stuff. Though I rarely ever agree with what he says 100%, and often find him a little extreme, I would very much miss his rants if he were to stop posting them. And if he did have a late night talk show, I'd most definitely watch it every night.

 

I don't agree with everything he says either, but there's plenty he says that I do agree with, and stuff I feel needs to be said. And it's good somebody is saying that stuff with feeling. Maybe some people don't like it, but I like it. I have no problem with ranting. This is people saying things on the internet, people should be able to tolerate some ranting and criticism without getting all bent out of shape.

Because it isn't intended for you. You won't get into this for the same reason you don't wake up at 6 am on Saturday mornings to watch cartoons (do kid's still do that? Or has the CN and other channels that air cartoons during the day killed the Saturday morning cartoon?). This show is not aimed at you. I think too many older SW fan are taking this show and looking at it as if it were made for them. A very exaggerated comparison, but it is like a paleontologist watching Barney and Friends for the first time, and feeling disappointed that the show's depiction of dinosours was not very accurate, and that it has very little to offer paleontologists or people truely interested in learning about dinosaurs. That is totally missing the point. Clone Wars is very clearly aimed at young kids, and for what it is it is doing its job. It doesn't have to fit into canon, or make sence, because that is not its purpose, its purpose is to amuse and entertain children. 

Ah, but it's pushed as being part of the canon, so it has to be judged by that standard. If it wasn't, if it was just this kids tv series that wasn't taken seriously as part of the canon, didn't have a big screen movie pushed as real Star Wars and was just part of the ordinary EU... then it could be treated as just a kids show with no big issues. But it IS being pushed as canon, with a big screen movie pushed as real Star Wars, so it does have to judged by that standard. The original Star Wars wasn't aimed at only kids. It was general audience. Anything that claims to be real canon Star Wars should go by that ground rule. If it's just aimed at little kids then it shouldn't be pushed as being the real thing.

And just because something's aimed at kids doesn't mean it should be dumb shallow crap. Kids aren't all morons. I gave the example of The Hobbit, a quality book that was written for kids and wasn't dumbed down or otherwise made crappy as part of making it appeal to kids. People should make quality for kids, instead of taking the lazy route and churning out crap under the assumption that it doesn't matter because they figure kids can't tell the difference.

I don't think it is very fair when people attack The Clone Wars so harshly. It is what it is. A kids TV series based off a successful but lame series of modern sci-fi films, which in turn was a spin off of some successful and well done older sci-fi films. I think some of us are just getting into the habit of attacking anything new with the name Star Wars on it, regardless of its merit. The Clone Wars is achieving what it set out to accomplish, no matter how good or how bad it does, some of us will tear it apart. Tons of good movies have silly kids shows based off of them. Where is the dissing of Star Trek: The Animated Series, Return to the Planet of the Apes, Ewoks, Droids. All those were some pretty crappy cartoons, but we have always managed to write them off as, "just for the kiddies". Why not this treatment for CW?

Simple, nobody's pushing Star Trek animated or Ewoks or Droids as serious canon. Whereas The Clone Wars IS being pushed as serious canon. When that movie came out I read multiple reviews arguing how it was real Star Wars, and in a statement in 2008 Lucas made it clear he considers the tv shows (by which I think he means this and the live action show) to be part of HIS Star Wars universe (as opposed to the EU), clearly what he considers canon. Once it's being pushed as real Star Wars canon it has to be judged by that standard. It has to live up to that standard or be held accountable. That's what's pissing people off about it. Because we're getting told this is the real thing, this is the holy writ, this is real Star Wars like the OT. A silly kids show shouldn't be pushed as being real Star Wars. If it wasn't we could let it be, but because it is we're forced to take it seriously and take it into account and we can't just dismiss it as a harmless kids show and let it be.

its purpose is to amuse and entertain children.

I think its purpose is to make money from children and turn a new generation of kids into dutiful followers of The Great Lucas.

C3PX said:

Vaderisnothayden said:

Ah, but it's pushed as being part of the canon...

So? What new Star Wars thing isn't being pushed as canon these days? The Force Unleashed, Clone Wars, the PT, all Star Wars canon. Star Wars canon totally sucks. I don't even think the unaltered original trilogy is even considered canon anymore, how could it be, since events happen differently in the OT than they do in the PT.

The official Star Wars canon does totally suck. And is invalid. But it's still a serious issue. When people are claiming "This is Star Wars. This is what counts", then you're forced to take it more seriously than if it wasn't pushed as that. Even if like me you feel the official canon is invalid the very fact that it's being offically pushed and accepted by many means you have to confront it.

And it's a fraud. Pushing this stuff as real Star Wars is a fraud. And there's good reason to be angry about the fraud. The Clone Wars isn't just being pushed as a little kids show that doesn't matter -it's being pushed as real Star Wars that counts. Which means it's being pushed as something we should care about. Which means in a crucial sense it IS being pushed as for us. And seeing as it's not made for us, it being pushed as in a way for us is something we've a right to be pissed off about. Like I said, it's a fraud and I'm pissed off about the fraud.

adywan said:

It does make me laugh me how people can say something is shit before they have even seen it

 

When everything from a particular source in a particular time period is shit, then yeah you can make a pretty good bet that anything new coming from the same source in the same general period is going to be shit. Every official Star Wars screen fiction since TPM has been shit and TPM wasn't impressive either. There hasn't been decent Star Wars screen fiction put out since 1983. So it's a pretty far reach to say they're going to start with the quality now, in a kid-aimed animated show based on the awful prequels universe. That'd be like hoping a pig would shit out gold. Not going to happen.

adywan said:

I never usually judge a TV series on its pilot but this time i did and i admit i was wrong to do so. Hell just look at the original pilot for Star Trek, "the cage". that was a total piece of shit and a completely different tone than the series would become. And now that Tv series is considered a classic.

 

The Cage was certainly in the same general ballpark range of quality as the series. Pilots may be different from their show and different in general quality, but they're usually in the same general ballpark range of quality. Maybe you won't get a precise idea of what the show's like from them but you will get some idea.

Just a heads up, if I ever do see the Clone Wars show and it turns out to be total crap like I expect it to be, then I'm going to come here and do a lot of saying I told you so.

bkev said:

Vader, I take it you haven't checked ou the EU.  I'd recommend the Thrawn trilogy by Timmothy Zahn; not to recent, but definitely past '83.

I've read various EU things. The Thrawn trilogy was ok, didn't make me feel strongly either way. But the EU isn't real for me. The Thrawn trilogy never felt to me like it was real Star Wars, none of these EU things do. And I was talking about what was on the screen because that's what was relevant here, that's what's most relevant to the question of what they're going to do screen fiction like. AOTC, ROTS, the original Clone Wars show... seriously didn't impress me. And if you go back in time, Ewoks, Droids, the Ewok movies were hardly up to standard. Wilfred Brimley was good in the second Ewok movie but overall the quality was seriously substandard. There hasn't been good Star Wars screen fiction since the OOT and that makes it highly unlikely that quality is suddenly going to start up in an animated show with nightmarish animation, aimed at kids, and set in the awful prequel universe with the prequel universe's pain-in-the-ass characters. And if I have to see one goddamn more modern day overdone isn't-it-cool lightsaber battle I'm going to puke.

C3PX said:

The Trawn trilogy was early '90s, and yeah, it was quite good. I think there was a lot of early EU stuff that wasn't half bad. There was also a lot of it that was total crap.It was fun because it was based off of Star Wars, and gave you a way back into that universe, sometimes with stories not even involving Han, Luke, or Leia. You could take what you wanted and leave what you didn't. I'd check them out from the library, usally two or three at a time, since some were ridiculously silly, if I started reading one that was crap, I could just put it down and grab the next one. After a while most of us learned which writers were worth reading and which ones were not.

So, I myself would not condemn everything post 1983, because I have enjoyed some of it very much.

Well, the genuinely early EU, from 76-86 or so, includes stuff from the period of the films and stuff extended from that, and that has two virtues later stuff doesn't have. A) It's from the era of the real Star Wars, often picking up on the mentality of the films in a way only something from that time can do. And B) It's what we remember from way back -the nostalgia factor. Some of the stuff from back then matters to me quite a bit. But I still don't count it as real Star Wars.

The later EU includes some ok stuff, but I don't take it very seriously. But that's not screen fiction. The EU screen fiction in more recent times has been the original Clone Wars show, with its one-Jedi-takes-on-an-army lunacy and its run-on endless meaningless battle scenes. I never saw the point of that show.

skyjedi2005 said:

That untrue unfortunetely HaydenisnotVAder As Lucas has Included The clone Wars 3D cartoon in the G-canon (george lucas canon) , as well as the force unleashed game.  and the upcoming tv show.

Officially The Clone Wars and the live action show are supposed to be T canon, which is a special level of canon just below the movie stuff and above everything else. But from what Lucas said I think he just considers them canon full stop. It's been said on this forum that Force Unleashed is considered serious canon, but I've yet to see proof. By serious canon in this context I mean considered canon by Lucas in his movies-and-tv-shows canon or officially count T canon or G canon by the Holocron official definition, above normal EU canon. I've yet to see any word from Lucas that he considers Force Unleashed to be in his personal canon. In May 2008 Lucas talked of his Star Wars being the movies and tv shows. Nowhere in there did he mention Force Unleashed. Force Unleashed is a BIG project, so surely he'd mention it in his list of canon if he considered it canon. I've been provided on this board some info about them trying to fit Force Unleashed in with continuity and it being canon but I'm not convinced that's talking about making it any more than C canon, the normal EU canon level.

But whatever canon they go by is invalid anyway. Any canon that includes the SE changes and Jar Jar and Hayden Skywalker is not a valid Star Wars canon. Lucas can count whatever he likes as canon, it doesn't count because he abrogated his authority when he did what he did in the SE. His work in the SE and PT has been at odds with Star Wars. The only real canon is the OOT.

All I know is this... last weeks episode (Cloak of Darkness) was great!! And vaderisnothayden....I actually think that some of TCW episodes are probably better than the PT movies. It seems that you hated all of those too, but I would say about 80-90% of TCW are very OT-ish.........speaking of that, this Friday...(The Lair of Grievous)...that should be sweet.....

Nothing with Greivous in it could be OT-ish, Greivous is a character totally at odds with the OT. I very much doubt I would call any of this stuff OT-ish. The movie was even more prequelish than the prequels. I doubt the show could be so different as to be totally on the opposite end of the scale. Modern Hayden-based Anakin, anime-drawn kid, Jar Jar Binks, silly fucking droid troopers, overdone prequelish lightsaber battles, look-isn't-it-cool dark Jedi character, General Greivously Ill-Making... it's not going to be OT-ish.