Tartakovsky Microseries - Nelvaan Crisis episodes - Excludable - Complete Cut

Anakin has a vision of his own future evil, whilst saving the corrupted natives of a planet. It’s the usual Tartakovsky fun, but it’s not important to any of our main plots, and yeah, we know, Anakin is going to turn into Vader, we don’t need it spelt out.

I liked the idea of putting this around the end of S5 and adding the scene where it’s implied that Padme and Anakin conceive Luke and Leia, but that’d still keep it excludable.

I also thought I’d merge the three cut elements from the original Muunilinst/Hypori story (which is Important), which are Kit Fisto on Mon Cala, Mace Windu on Dantooine, and Barriss and Luminara on Ilum. The latter though would be problematic, as it shows Barriss creating her lightsaber, so it must come earlier. Maybe it belongs with its original opening episode.

S05E17-20 - The Fall of Ahsoka Arc - Vital - Mandalorian Cut

This is vital, and also belongs in the Mandalorian Cut (which means it also belongs in the Quality, Continuity, and Complete Cuts- it’s the top of the pyramid), because it features major development for Ahsoka.

There’s not much more that needs to be said. Every second of it is fantastic and it’s the heart of the show. It mentions General Krell, which might mean Umbara is Important enough for the Quality cut, but I don’t think he needs to appear in the Mando cut.

This doesn’t have any major breaks in it, but I’d probably release it as two parts.

S05E10-13 - The Droid Commandos Arc - Objectionable - Not Including

Fuck me, what a horrible arc. An extremely abrasive goofy character is introduced, with a preposterous bit of plot that necessitates the introduction of yet more silly slapstick characters and some nonsense plots in a featureless environment the colour of sick.

It introduces Gregor, who later appears in Rebels, but tough fuckin’ luck because this arc is the main reason we need an ‘objectionable’ rating in the first place.

I appreciate George wanted to lean into his more artistic existential inklings with this one, and I get that ‘Sunny Day’ wanted to explore programming versus instinct. I know Star Wars can be pretty much every genre. But nah. Not this, not here.

S05E06-09 - The Jedi Younglings Arc - Excludable - The Complete Cut

A good fun arc, this, and a good one to show kids whether or not they watch Clone Wars.

In the first episode, some Younglings earn their lightsaber crystals. There’s then maybe room for one or two episodes of delay, before the final three episodes cover the Younglings trying to make their own lightsabers before getting attacked by Hondo’s pirates, and ultimately teaming up with them to escape Grievous and Dooku. It’s also great to see Hondo getting drunk.

It’s fun, but not important to the overall plot, and it’s one too many episodes of Dooku and Grievous without jeopardy.

I don’t think this one is vital if you were a continuity hound, so I’m categorising it as part only of the Complete Cut, for only the audience who want to watch absolutely everything.

So having finished the first and second Maul quadrilogies, I then took a look at two of the most prominent TV-to-movie cuts of these arcs.

The first I watched, Outbound Flight’s MAUL: SON OF DATHOMIR, was fantastic. It presented the first and second Maul arcs as one, intercut with Maul’s encounter with Kenobi in Rebels. Since this was released at a time before Maul returned for the Clone Wars finale, its ‘present’ occurs up until Palpatine comes to put his house in order, and the shots from Maul-Kenobi are really well chosen to suit the present day plot - until they catch up to that moment. It’s effective! Outbound Flight also made a few neat cuts, most notably cutting most of Revenge, since many of its beats are covered by the next episode, Revival. The video quality was a bit low but I think that was just the version I had. If you wanted a complete story of Maul (other than the Clone Wars finale), it was a great cut.

The second, Smudger9’s RISE OF THE DARK SIDE, was also great. It started a little earlier, focusing on the Nightsisters arc followed by the first return of Maul episodes. The usual extremely competent technical cuts were present many of which I’d likely borrow for my own edits, especially in the Nightsisters episodes.

Both very good edits and each a great way to do a deep dive into these elements of the story if that was what you sought. But to me, as I’m sure you already know I’m going to say, compiling all of their episodes into tight movies like this felt like the elements weren’t given time to breathe, and they were dependent on implied time jumps. They were strong character studies, but the pacing felt a little too intense and full. Having watched those episodes with a mentality to split them over a longer time, I remain convinced that this is a good idea.

Still - both very strong edits which absolutely achieve the goals they intended to.

[Deleted with apologies]

Sonofabindi- thanks for the sense checks.

G&G-Fan-
The when has a couple of answers. I’ve got a strong feeling that merely presenting the series in a different way will add value, in which case a recommended ordering won’t take long at all - we’re maybe a week away from that. Then there will be a preparation period as I work on the standards for episode intros/outros in collaboration with the community, and work on some edits without time pressure as I get a feel for SW standards like wipes and music transitions, organise resources, and set up some templates which’ll help as I edit.

But once I get started properly on the edits, we’ll get 90% of the way there relatively quickly I think, but 100% will take much longer - and it will be very much a living project.

First I’ll produce the technical edits required to refocus the project. This will be the high priority edits which comprise the ‘Quality Cut’ of the show - the best and most important episodes, in new chronological order. I will do a few at my own pace first, and release them to the community for feedback before diving in to the live release schedule. But then, since many episodes will simply be merged and bookended without major editing required, I feel comfortable committing to a weekly schedule, since the many easier ones I’ll be able to get out of the way quickly while I focus on the more technical ones.

(Clone Wars is, luckily, a relatively easy show to edit, because it doesn’t have music in its center channel, so you’re able to separate speech/fx from music very easily, which is very rare.)

As I run through the Quality Cut, I’ll be rolling in your feedback on episodes as I go, so there may be later re-releases with a bit of polish (but I’d like to emphasise that we’ll be focusing on such good episodes that it’ll be a moment here, a bad joke there, a continuity polish there - nothing awful for a first time viewer.)

After the Quality Cut is v1 complete, there are two branches I can take. The first is moving on to the Continuity Cut episodes, then the Complete Cut episodes. The second is deeper detail polish on the Quality cut to refine it even further, perhaps incorporating more radical ideas. These elements are that final 10%. I don’t intend to release the Continuity Cut or Complete Cut episodes on the weekly schedule - at that point, the project becomes ‘as and when’.

After completing every damn thing to v1 (excluding the shit episodes), I’ll still consider this a living project. That’s less me doing people a favour and more me being endlessly passionate about this show. I’ll continue to analyse each approach, and look for opportunities to tweak and improve.

In terms of where they’ll be available, I’ll maintain a master Gdoc with links to Gdrive files, at least through the Quality Cut and probably through the Complete cut v1. Once there’s some level of stability I’ll consider a torrent. But it’s such a bitty thing that probably the only way to manage it is by granular hosting.

❤️ ❤️ ❤️

I’d really like to use the weekly release schedule as an opportunity to have multiple people focus on the same story at the same time - much like we do in the movie threads where single elements get a huge amount of community focus until the best ideas rise to the top.

I know all of us here are excited to consume the Clone Wars in a really enjoyable way. I’m excited to produce it for all of you. But please also consider - there are so many Star Wars fans out there who’d love to consume it in the best way too, not just now, but in the future. And if we collaborate on this, and give each episode the attention and care it deserves, we can produce something even more considered and refined. So I would ask all of you that are interested to please treat this as an act of creation, not just consumption. The project will be better for your input. Join me in a weekly review of one episode in deep focus at a time. Criticise the episodes, criticise my edits, let us build this together and give a gift to everyone who wants to enjoy this brilliant show.

Changed approach for ranking

I thought some more about how best to present this project, and of course it has to suit its audience.

I believe we have four core audiences - four core reasons someone might choose to watch the Clone Wars right now

1. Because they want context for the Mandalorian
2. Because they want an edit of the Clone Wars which focuses on the most important and very best stories (much as Smudger and other editors have sought to produce)
3. Because they want all of the above but also the ones which focus on continuity and canon - Tarkin, Ackbar, Saw Gererra, etc
4. Because they just want all of the Clone Wars in the best order with just the worst episodes cut out

Does this feel like a good idea? Can anyone think of any other (major) audiences?

Since much of this project will be presentation, I want to make this as accessible as possible for people, so I’ve made the initial workings of a document which will help point people in the right direction, which I’ll update while I work on the edits.

You can find it here, where you can also find my first-pass allocation of episodes to audiences: [Removed link - PM me for details]
(Eventually this will contain links to the files, but right now it’s empty)

Feel free to challenge and correct those allocations.

New OP for those who’ve been following along, now that decisions have been made and more of this project has come into focus.

You can ignore this post - I’m just putting the original OP here in case people want it for future reference.

The Clone Wars is a sometimes-excellent show that people really want to love, in spite of its shortcomings, so it’s seen a number of edits. Smudger kicked it off with his five TV-to-movie edits. Expanded Universes and Kanemedhurst continued in that tradition. Outbound Flight produced a Maul edit, and others have recently had their own ideas. I’ve enjoyed these edits a lot.

By and large, I’ve found that these edits essentially aim for a two-ish hour runtime, and combine a couple of major arcs. This is done by the editors as well as it can be - either by finding thematically resonant arcs, or at least ones which don’t compete over the same characters, and interlacing them as neatly as possible, before editing the whole for quality. It’s about the best you can do if you’re looking to produce movie-like features, and a lot of these movies have been really excellent.

But this approach poses its own problems. Firstly, as Smudger himself reported early on (I think for his second or third movie), you can end up with a feeling that you’ve basically just taken two unrelated narratives and interlaced them. And secondly, that even the good arcs can drag. They were forced toward a 22-minute runtime, which often means filler action, and it also means that the story tends to break in 22-minute chunks. Uneven pacing like this is compounded by a further delay if you’re intercutting to another story. The capable editors we have here have worked around these issues well, but ultimately these challenges are going to appear and need solving for any TV-to-movie attempt.

(Maul’s content is probably an exception here. There’s enough volume for a good two-plus hour cut, and a good balance of character development and action. But one of the issues I’ve found with others’ approaches to the Maul arcs is that if you do condense your Maul content into one or two movies, then you kind of take away the malice and the focus of Maul’s presence throughout the show. So now you have the opposite problem - you make a good movie, but the series itself feels like a loose connection of anthology ideas, rather than something with a resonant core and real momentum.)

Another issue that I have with moviefying the show, is that a lot of the smaller moments and single episodes with some good charming meat to them tend to get ignored in favour of the larger arcs. Yes, we’re faced with the challenge that what was essentially an episodic anthology show at its outset became more focused and arc-structured by its end - and indeed where it ended up has become much more relevant to the future of the franchise (Ahsoka, Mandalore, Maul, the Bad Batch, etc) - but there was certainly a charm to some of the ‘wilderness’ feeling of some of those smaller episodes. Mandalorian has this too, with some of its smaller, near-standalone episodes, really just being valuable texture for the world. And I’d like to get some of that feeling of this being a large-scale long-term war on many fronts back.

Now, I understand the momentum to shift these episodes into movies, since movies are Star Wars’ most culturally dominant format. But I recently saw that NumeralJoker has been cutting together some of the arcs simply as complete arcs - however long those arcs are - as part of his 4K AI Upscaling project. And that made me realise that - for me at least - there’s no real need for movie-length episodes of this series. (Also, regarding NumeralJoker’s edits: They look absolutely gorgeous, but he hasn’t made any edits to the content, leaving the arcs with some of the pacing and story quality issues mentioned above.)

Consider the Mandalorian. Last Friday we all watched an episode which was only 32 minutes long, and we enjoyed it as much as some of the movies. Episodes of the Mandalorian are as long or as short as they need to be.

So here’s the plan:

1. Start from the chronological ordering of episodes, split into arcs (49 by my count - some of which are single 22-minute episodes, and some of which are four or more episodes long). These arcs become our new episodes.
2. Exclude any arcs which are both bad stories and not relevant to the core plots of the show (Bridging eps 2-3 in terms of world and movie characters, Ahsoka, Maul, Mandalore)
3. Replace as many episodes as possible with NumeralJoker’s 4K arcs
4. Replace any arcs with decent edits produced by other editors (sometimes splitting a movie back down into its constituent arcs if it’s been edited well). One that I’ll almost definitely use is Smudger’s first. I’ve been reviewing the original TCW movie and the Hutt Baby arc is just awful, and Smudger absolutely nailed it with his replacement.
   Cut the remaining episodes into their arcs
5. Edit the arcs now on quality of story, paying no attention to length. The goal, as with the Mandalorian, is to simply produce the best possible end-to-end story with the available material. If some arcs naturally merge into nearer movie length episodes then allow them to do this - though I suspect that Smudger’s first movie was bottled lightning. On the flipside, don’t merge arcs just because they have the same characters - pay attention to the pacing of the whole, as a series.
6. Review any particularly decent cut content, to see if it can be reincorporated with any other episode in an elegant way
7. Make any changes necessary to better pace the series as a whole
8. Package it all up, also including the Tartakovsky show up front (in 4K, thanks again NumeralJoker), the Son of Dathomir Audio Comic (by Star Wars Audio Comics and The Lore Master), and maybe an optional mix of Siege of Mandalore with an edit of ROTS which closely respects TCW (I’ll either use someone else’s or make this myself).
   What does this produce, at the end? A TV series which presents the most and best of the clone wars - an episodic story of the changes to the characters and the world which bridge Episodes 2 and 3, whilst setting up the key elements which become the core of its emotional finale and relevant to the stories which follow in other shows and movies.

It’s certainly ambitious. But I’d love to hear your thoughts.

I suppose a cold open is a promise you make to the audience when you’re certain you can deliver on it. I’ll wait and see if I believe I can.

OK, that’s two in favour of the cold open. And Sade, yes, I’ve been thinking about Rebels too.

Fact of the matter is that what I’m finding here, as I review these, is that presentation is so key. Honestly, viewing these two shows through the lens of Mandalorian has been so healthy. What are Mando’s strengths? Each episode is self-contained, tight, the length it needs to be, and fucking excellent whether or not it’s focusing on the big overarching plot. And the show as a whole isn’t clustering its characters and locations into arcs, it’s letting them breathe across the show. We feel Moff Gideon’s presence across the show since his reveal. We anticipate his return and the return of the Darksaber. We anticipated the return of [redacted] since they were mentioned. We now anticipate the return of [redacted again], who I’m amazed they just mentioned. Meanwhile, we get a great episode every time, and we trust that the overarching plot will move along at a decent pace.

There needs to be a rolling, ever-present, over-arcing threat. And that isn’t the Clone Wars, because we know the outcome. And it isn’t Palpatine, because we know his outcome too. The threat and the anticipation comes from the wild card element and the presence of characters we care about who we don’t know the fate of*. And that wild card is Maul, and the main character we care for is Ahsoka.

(*Note: Knowing the ‘fate’ of a person doesn’t mean knowing whether or not they die. It means knowing how these events affect them personally and change their character.)

So that’s the mission statement: We care for Ahsoka from as early as possible, and we fear Maul from as early as possible. The metric for anything else is firstly whether or not it adds to that, and secondly, is it excellent?

I think this’ll be the most radical part of this show. That I think the Mauldalore content should begin ASAP and be spread evenly throughout. I’ve checked, and Ahsoka doesn’t appear in any of the early stuff, so we can break the ‘new character models’ rule and put the Nightsister arc way earlier.

The interesting thing about this is that so much of this can be fixed by presentation - literally me just saying ‘Here’s a list, watch these episodes in this order.’ And honestly, I genuinely believe there’ll be new value in that.

Next will be polish, the actual editing. We’ve already cut the shite episodes, but now we need to prune for the best and tighten up the most necessary ones.

Then, more presentation. Watching today’s Mando I was struck by the nice art that goes over the credits. Each episode has these too, and they’re readily available. Imagine if each outro gave you lovely art showing you a bit more about how the pie is made, to give you a few more seconds to digest what you just watched. I think there’s real value there too. I’ll also make sure the opening cards are tight, and draw you in in the right way. It should be something like:

1. (Optional) Previously On (requires sound editing capabilities)
2. Modern red/blue droid/helmet SW TV logo
3. Star Wars: The Clone Wars logo (s7 version)
4. One screen worth of three short sentences of blue intro text (like Solo)
5. [take a beat]
6. Episode title
7. [take a beat]
8. Begin episode (probably iris out, mostly)

Finally, there’s the pro polish pass on the editing. Before I acquired digital copies, I watched my DVDs on a PS4, so I don’t have a DVD reader that I can rip the raw files from. This means my audio editing can’t be sky’s the limit because the tracks aren’t separated. I’m sure SW sound effects are easy to get hold of, and I’ll buy the soundtracks if I need to, plus I don’t actually have the skill to sound edit yet (but I won’t let that stop me). But it would be nice to, let’s say, add in Mando’s theme tune’s ‘da-dungg’ at a key point for Bo-Katan, for example. This would also allow for the extension of openings to allow the opening beats to last longer (and thus invite us into the world that much more).

S05E16 - The Lawless - Vital

Let’s not spoil this one. You could almost cut this about halfway, and the prior episode about halfway too, because there are a couple of points which take a breather. But that would turn this and the last episode into four ten minute episodes, which I think is pushing it. If I ever made the show more serialised, (which probably isn’t super possible, but either way would be one of the last things I did), I’d think about taking those ten minute chunks and compiling them with other episodes. But for now I think we have enough ‘units’ of Mauldalore to allow its presence to be felt throughout.

Do you have a detailed changelog, OutboundFlight?

S05E15 - Shades of Reason - Vital

Maul and Deathwatch take over Mandalore. We’re deep in awesome territory now. We also end on a breakpoint that accounts for a time skip, so we can break the arc here too. This is all really helping us split out the Mauldalore timeline across the show.

I also had a thought about getting us up to this point - the second Mandalore arc puts Almec in prison, but it isn’t necessary up until now. So it can come at any time in the timeline before here, meaning our second Mando episode can be Ahsoka and Lux on Concord Dawn.

S05E14 - Eminence - Vital

Maul teams up with Death Watch to take over the major crime organisations. Hell yes.

The nice thing about this is that it ends with the intention to start taking over Mandalore, but no strict timeline, so we can split this off from the episodes that follow for yet more pacing.

Continuity wise it kills Don Corleone Hutt, but I think he’s fairly minimal (in this edit, and in the latter half of the show) anyway. Kinda wish I’d taken more detailed continuity notes like deaths as I went through this watch now - please feel free to chime in with any other major ones folks and I’ll retroactively add them to my reviews (since I’ll be leaning on these reviews as I rebuild the show).

Presentation of the show will be important, and I’ll make a larger post about that later.

I don’t want to get too radical with this show, because I think that’ll put people off. But since there’s a degree of presenting this as worthy of your interest if you’re a fan of Mandalorian, what do you think of adding a single scene right at the top of our first episode: One where armoured Mandalorians, wielding the Darksaber, come across Maul frozen and near death in an escape pod, and ask “What are you?”, followed by the text FOUR YEARS EARLIER (or whatever’s appropriate for the chronology)? I think it’s the ideal scene to frame the show - but only if it’s a good idea to frame it that way.

S05E01 - Revival - Vital

Obi-Wan catches up to Maul and Savage as they’re attempting to take over Hondo’s pirate gang. Lovely. In terms of continuity, this follows the Younglings arc, and it also features Adi Gallia’s death.

I’d be quite tempted to have the episodes between Maul’s last appearance and this one not feature Obi-Wan, to imply he’s been permitted to hunt Maul. I’ll see if that’s possible.

This episode can’t wait too long until it’s followed by Eminence, because in the intervening time we have Maul and Savage injured and freezing in space.

Yep, completely agree. I might keep a little of the first Christophsis episode - Trench is actually quite capable (and shows up later), and I’d like to show Bail being involved in aid missions. But then, yes, right to the point. On the Troopers story, the first episode is a little paint-by-numbers, so I will look for places to keep it tight, but it’s important to that overall arc.

There are a couple of technicalities in there, but the Important thing to know is that they make it work.

All of the elements that are new for TCW compared to ROTS are handled extremely carefully- the questions asked by their presence will be answered by the end.

There’s a reason people are so passionate about this show and a lot of it comes down to the fact that it absolutely delivers on Ahsoka.

Wexter, that’s what I’d like to achieve too. That constant presence and ongoing development. I think the problem comes from the fact that we get very little armoured Mandalorians, and zero Maul, until about the 60% mark.

I could pull them forward- you could probably put Nightsisters before the model update since I don’t think Ahsoka appears in them until far later (though you have to get all the ventress episodes out of the way first), but if you do that you’re left with less meat in the second half.

Then again, we are slightly making this something it’s not. The emotional heart is Ahsoka; Maul and Mando were always far later focuses of the show.

Perhaps if I lay out a line with just the Maul/Mando content in its best order, then string Ahsoka’s best episodes across it, then fill in the gaps with well paced choices for important and desirable elements, then take note of the excludable ones’ positions, we’ll get our answer.

Knight of Kalee, bear in mind that they’re all staying in unless they’re actively difficult to watch episodes. And MAYBE some of the skippable episodes may be looted for parts by the more important ones. But I’m not proposing their exclusion*- only that if you were only watching the core, or the most important/fun episodes, that you wouldn’t need to watch them to keep context.

I was on the fence about that one, but I could be convinced.

*I’m using the word “excludABLE” to imply that one MAY exclude them. Not that they ARE excluded. “Skippable” is perhaps a better term… But there’s no such thing as a VIDSO.

OK, here’s a far more important question:

What’s more important? That we get to the Maul/Mandalore bits soonest, or that we spread them out (but mainly across the second half of the show)?

Whoops, I edited my previous comment instead. Wexter’s responding to my question about whether or not to spread arc content between episodes to create more flow, but on reflection I think this’ll be far easier to edit and present optional approaches for if each episode is kept standalone.

S04E19 - Massacre - Important

Not vital, since this is the branch of the Nightsisters storyline which doesn’t follow the return of Maul.

It’s great though, robots versus zombie witches as part of Sidious’ move to clean house and take a rival force wielder wildcard faction off the board. And we see some nice dangerous Grievous, and the continued fall of Ventress.

You could move this closer to Witches of the Mist, I don’t think Ventress needs this long on her own.

S04E20 - Bounty - Excludable

I nearly called this Important, for two reasons:

1. It’s got Boba in it - but it’s not important to Boba’s growth to see that he was a fairly ineffective Bounty Hunter when he was starting out
2. It’s got Ventress in it - but it’s not important to her growth to show that she took a stint as a Bounty hunter and was slightly morally unsure about it. We’re going to get more shades of Grey with Ventress later in the fall of Ahsoka, so we don’t need it here, and we learn she’s been bounty hunting in her next appearance.

This isn’t a particularly strong episode, it’s mainly a bunch of action on a train.

S04E21-22 - The Return of Maul arc - Vital

This is really the only bit of this quadrilogy that’s the Maul arc - the other two episodes are other things.

It does have to follow Massacre though, since Talzin acknowledges that the rest are dead, as it currently stands.

I’m not a big fan of the goofy worm thing, but it’s relatively unavoidable. We do spend a little too long getting to Maul, which could be trimmed. I also think it’s a bit silly of the council to allow Obi-Wan to go alone to fight Maul, but I understand that we need it for the story. Everything else is super though. By this episode the theoretical new viewer will definitely be feeling the tension of Maul’s presence.

I’ll be taking a look at some other approaches taken too, to see about smart trims and reshaping.

If you were going to watch it, I’d probably space it further from Massacre, to imply some time had passed. That said, I’d really like to get us to this point as quickly as possible.