sade1212

It’d certainly be daring and radical to put Mandalore up front, but I agree with Knight of Kalee that Christophsis should remain first because of all of its specific character introduction moments. That’s one of the things that’s always irritated me about the chronological order having Cat and Mouse first: you’re just dropped straight in. I think that’s part of why, when I first decided to watch TCW, I wound up starting Cat and Mouse three or four times before eventually actually getting through it and bingeing the rest of the show.

If you’re too concerned about introducing Ahsoka and then immediately dropping her, you could jigger the order slightly and put Cloak of Darkness or Malevolence in second, though they’re unfortunately weaker episodes. Alternatively, you could continue the precedent, and arrange the episodes such that Ahsoka is occasionally randomly absent from one episode, but never two in a row, if possible.

I’m increasingly convinced that SandMTV is an AI. Serious /r/subredditsimulator vibes.

To be entirely honest, I’ve never noticed NumeralJoker’s processed versions being significantly better, just a little more saturated. Even now that we’re in the era of real AI upscaling, I’m still skeptical that you can meaningfully create a 10-bit colour source from an 8-bit colour one.

I also thought it was the Avengers theme at first, haha. I like it, though it’s very intense and thus might be a little much. I second the comment regarding the transition to the piano bit for the episode title being a bit abrupt.

Clearly the most reasonable solution here is to change the intro music about every twenty episodes, because Clone Wars is an anime.

SandMTV is the most fascinating poster on this forum. How do they find these threads? I thought they might be some kind of bot at first, or even some sort of GPT-3 powered AI, but their posts are just about too coherent for that to be the case. Is it “Sand M T V” or “S and M TV”? The latter is more concerning.

I like both and I’m glad to see the subtler music return. It pairs really well with the centered and more spread out intro text. I also enjoyed the panning concept art a lot, so I hope that’s not too much extra work to keep.

If you go with V4, maybe consider having the TCW logo start more zoomed-in so it reaches the same ultimate size as it does in V3 despite being on-screen for a shorter time. I’d still be tempted by a fatter credits font, also - I think the Siege of Mandalore at least uses a pretty wide font for its “Created by George Lucas” text etc.

Have you thought about ending the final line of text with the amusingly-incorrect-but-traditional four dots that every opening crawl has?

That’d be a fantastic improvement if you can manage it. I’ve always found it somewhat uncomfortable how our heroes are cold, unfeeling killers in TROS. Rey gets all choked up when she stabs Ben and decides to heal him, but she didn’t even flinch when she shot half his subordinates earlier.

At least in the OT, there’s nothing to contradict the idea that the Stormtroopers were voluntarily giving their lives to defend fascism, and thus they weren’t particularly sympathetic, but the ST makes it very clear that the First Order enslaves children and that quite a few of them would defect if given a chance.

Yeah, I agree, he’s a really angry guy. I got the impression that OT Vader doesn’t often care about things - the opinions and failures of random Imperials are little more than nuisances to him - but when he does care, like with Luke or the Death Star plans, he really gets passionate about it.

That was actually one thing that irritates me about his ROTS portrayal. He starts his Sithening with the very appropriate and emotional “What have I done!?” and “I can’t live without her!” but then he pretty much immediately starts doing a bad OT Vader impression (“Yes, my master…”). I feel like the loyalty that he demonstrates in the OT would’ve come from years of Palpatine wearing him down, in line with “It’s too late for me, son… You don’t know the power of the dark side.”, rather than just being something he adopted immediately. Oh well. At least we get a bit of angry Vader on the landing platform, and after he gets his suit, even if he still has a few weird lines in there about lectures.

• Splitting the text as you have and adding capitalisation is a great improvement. The slight zoom on the TCW logo also works well.
• The new intro music is alright, but I think I’m in the minority who quite liked the original, more melancholy music. While having Ahsoka’s theme there certainly helps cement her as the main character, I wouldn’t want a prospective audience to get sick of it, or for the repetition to reduce the impact of its use at the end of Season 5 (which I presume you’ll replicate to some degree).
• I’m not sold on the yellow credits text. Bright yellow is a Star Wars colour, but I don’t think it looks very nice on anything except black. I’d be tempted to use the teal, but to experiment with slightly zooming in each piece concept art and slowly panning across it in some random direction.
• I still think the TCW logo should be the first thing we see after the Star Wars TV intro (assuming cold opens aren’t feasible); and I think the new music would actually facilitate that even better.
• Regarding using screenshots of deleted scenes for the credits: isn’t it mostly unfinished, pre-viz stuff? I’d be in favour of filtering any screenshots you do use. An alternative is fanart but that’s a lot of permissions to ask for.
• On the topic of deleted scenes, it seems there are some fully animated sequences. Perhaps they could be readded, where they don’t conflict with the final episode, to beef up the runtime of shorter episodes. Though perhaps that goes against the ethos of cutting away filler.

Well, she’s popping up in Bad Batch and this show, which should give plenty of time for her character to have some focus and some deeper development.

Hmm, the only thing that comes to mind is TROS: Ascendant adding his

Spoiler

ghost

to the final scene of TROS.

Unfortunately Shamook’s videos aren’t at a perfect 23.976 fps, so they have a few duplicated/missed frames. You could fix this manually, and use EBSynth to generate the missing frames, but it’s a little bit of a pain.

Spoilers for the Rise of Kylo Ren, but the

retcon that he blew up the temple by accident is essentially just done so that his first Jedi kill can be built up to as a big moment - in the final issue we absolutely do see him outright murder one of his previous friends.

Considering how much it’s always irritated me that Anakin goes from cutting off Mace’s hand to slaughtering children in about half an hour, I was glad to see Kylo’s fall given a little more time to breathe.

And yeah, the old EU was primarily retired to make room for the sequels, not to get rid of prequel-era material. The prequels actually did pretty well out of it: because TCW was the only non-film material to remain canon, this means that a lot of the new EU - Rebels, Mando, Jedi Fallen Order, the comics, Vader Immortal, the new Thrawn books and so on - actually wound up leaning quite heavily on TCW and consequently tying-in nicely to the prequels in a way that a lot of the old EU didn’t (especially stuff like the original Thrawn trilogy that predated the prequels). TCW itself had actually disrupted a lot of the old EU’s prequel-era material when it was originally airing, because George cared little for the EU beyond the cool designs he could take from it to use in his own stories (like Aayla and Quinlan).

Time for some intense nitpicking:

• I feel like the blue scene-setting text could do with some antialiasing. The “W” in “…early days of the Clone Wars” is a good example of the aliasing. I generally get around issues like this by rendering simple stuff like crawls or text or credits out at 4K, or even 8K, and then letting Premiere resize it down to 1080p, but I don’t know if that’s possible with your Vegas workflow. Apologies if this is just a Vimeo thing.
• The dead-still Clone Wars logo feels like it could be doing something. Perhaps I’m just overly used to how it retreats in the series’ original intro. The Mandalorian’s logo zooms in slowly.
• Something seems odd to me about going set-up text -> show logo -> episode name, since the first and last will change for each episode but the logo won’t. The syncing of the text and the logo and the episode name to the music are great though, so sacrificing that would be a shame. (Maybe you could kill two birds with one stone here: if the logo was between the Star Wars intro and the first line of the setting text, you could use that time for some kind of musical bridge to alleviate CMMAP’s concern about that transition. Perhaps an additional line of text would then be needed to maintain the music sync.)
• Sometimes the credits text is difficult to read over the background. There’s already a shadow but perhaps some kind of dark glow might help. The Mandalorian manages because of a) being lighter text on often dark concept art, b) having the concept art be constantly in motion and c) having much thicker text, so some combination of those would probably help.
• Some of the ‘concept art’ is just images from the episode, and a few of them don’t fill the screen. I’m assuming this is placeholder though.

Now for the stuff I liked:

• The music choices are fantastic and add a real gravitas to the intro and especially the outro. (Edit - seems this is controversial; but my vote is to definitely keep the outro music).
• It feels very professional, and very artistic. It’s very tonally distant from the newsreel, but I think that works well - it has a similar tone to the final arc, which is my favourite bit of TCW.
• Your scene-setting text is smartly written and pleasant to read. You even picked my preferred spelling of neutralise. If I absolutely had to quibble I’d bring up the use of both “newly” and “new” in the fourth line, and I’d argue for “Jedi Council” rather than “Jedi council”.
• I’ve never bothered to look up any TCW concept art so I enjoyed seeing it and am looking forward to more.
• That Star Wars TV intro from Mando never fails to get me hyped. I’d disagree with CMMAP and argue to keep it even if the transition isn’t perfect.
• There was plenty of time to read everything.

Edit: I agree with McFibb that a cold open would be very cool. Perhaps after the intro text, though, otherwise there’s really absolutely no context for what’s going on. I’m also in favour of selective capitalisation of the set-up text. For all its other sins, I felt the intro text of Star Wars Theory’s Vader fanfilm actually had a quite effective use of capitalisation.

They’re not going to retcon the Sequel Trilogy. Like how the previous generation had to come to terms with the prequels being forever a part of Star Wars, the current generation will have to come to terms with the sequels. There’s hope for them to be slowly improved and augmented with ancillary material - what you could consider a slow retconning, maybe - as the prequels were, and of course this very forum works tirelessly producing fanedits to highlight their strengths while trimming the flaws, so it’s not all doom and gloom. In fact, we already have a comic clarifying that Kylo sort of blew up the Temple by accident, and certainly made no particular effort to thoroughly exterminate his fellow students.

Speaking of ancillary material that helped redeem a once-much-hated trilogy of films: TCW was, from the beginning, doomed to end with Anakin (one of the main heroes of the show, no less) killing everyone. In fact, we knew the fate of essentially every character besides Ahsoka - the films had already depicted the deaths of Obi-Wan, Anakin/Vader, Padme, Yoda, Mace Windu, Palpatine (well…), the entire Jedi Order… And yet still Clone Wars managed to be one of the best pieces of Star Wars content and is widely loved. Telling compelling stories in the gaps is a time-honoured Star Wars tradition.

Feed all of the footage of Daisy Ridley singing into a newfangled machine learning AI voice generator and synthesise this. Needledrop it over Yub Nub to set up Episode VII.

I’m imagining all the Jedi we hear in TROS just stood together in the World Between Worlds, watching Rey through one of the portals.

It’s a stretch to describe Rey vs Kylo in TFA as a humiliation. She barely defends herself, then unexpectedly goes at him in a rage, and after a struggle lands a single blow. Plus, not to reiterate tired points, but Kylo had also just been shot, was riding something of a post-patricide emotional rollercoaster, and wasn’t trying to kill her. It’s certainly not as humiliating as having your spaceship blown up by a ten year old by accident, or having twenty years worth of R&D on a massive space station rendered moot by a lucky shot from a redneck.

You can headcanon whatever you want. No need to be “offended”. There’s already another entire fleshed-out Star Wars continuity where Luke goes on to be cloned, marries a ginger, fights aliens, has his nephew turn to the dark side and takes part in a second galactic civil war (wait a second), etc. Or you can just ignore both EUs.

On the topic of versions of this scene that go even further than Jonh’s, I’m quite fond of this one, which also has the advantage of having pleasing art. I think Jonh’s is as close as you can feasibly get to it with fanediting, though, without going too far in a few places.

I always got the impression that Rey’s background was carefully planned to fully equip her with a standard set of Star Wars skills so she could be a flexible protagonist right off the bat. Being a scavenger who’s spent years with criminals and lowlifes on a pretty rough planet makes her athletic, practiced with melee weapons, a skilled mechanic with a knowledge of old Imperial and Rebellion stuff that she’s salvaged, resourceful, able to fly a speeder (and other vehicles she may have had a chance to use on Jakku), etc. I felt this was intentional to avoid having her spend a whole movie being a confused farmboy or a child like our previous protagonists. Disney wanted TFA to make a bang all by itself, not just set up the next two movies, and they knew people expected lightsaber fights and force powers.

Shyriiwook must be a very straightforward language, since even 22-year old ex-scumrat and Imperial Academy expellee Han Solo seemed to be able to understand it.

I could see Cad Bane and Boba Fett’s remaining content being retrofit into the early Empire era, especially given the current resurgence of Boba. The Sith Temple under Coruscant arc could possible be reused - hopefully we’ll finally be able to see the ex-Jedi Temple as the Imperial Palace in something other than comics, books and tabletop RPG stuff. I do have my doubts that Yoda will sneak away from Dagobah for some high intensity battles though (at least, I really, really hope he doesn’t…). It will forever remain a mystery how he came to have good relations with the Wookiees.

Hmm, I see the appeal of doing something like that but, as you say, it brings back a lot of the problems of movie edits. Personally I don’t think I’d be in favour: unless you can conceive and then execute edits which merge episodes in a way that feels right, every single time, we would just be entering “merging unrelated content” territory. I’d save merging for stuff like The Deserter, where you’ve stripped an episode down below twenty minutes and have no choice but to
use other footage to fatten it back up. That - combined with splitting up longer arcs to keep the maximum episode runtime below fifty or so minutes - would be enough to minimise the length fluctuations, I imagine.

To maintain a sense of it being a series, I’d suggest just trying to wrangle the episode order such that we never have too many episodes in a row without an appearance from Ahsoka, since she’s the main main character. I wouldn’t worry too much about Anakin and Obi-Wan because, as I understand it, one of the goals of this edit is to have Ahsoka emerge as the main character from the start, and time spent away from Anakin and Obi-Wan reinforces that. Besides, we don’t have to see everyone every episode - even ATLA has episodes like Zuko Alone, Appa’s Lost Days, or the Boiling Rock two-parter.

Here are my thoughts, having reread the big post:

• Is it “months earlier”? TCW covers about two and a half years, and you’ve got Eminence about halfway through the show. Then again, there’s definite a time jump between the original six seasons and the revival episodes (as made apparent in Anakin’s hair and Ahsoka’s deisgn), so “years earlier” would imply too much time. Wookieepedia has Christophsis in 22 BBY and Eminence in 19 BBY, which surprised me.
• My vote is to keep the Domino Squad arc together, even if it means using cheap tricks like “MANY MONTHS LATER” titlecards between the three episodes or something. Helps you remember who’s who in Domino Squad, IMO. It’s definitely an odd one, because ultimately Rookies is a fairly decent early episode for establishing Rex and the Clones, while iirc Clone Cadets is more of a set up for ARC Troopers than for Rookies itself. Having two adjacent Season 3 episodes act as a prequel and then a sequel to an episode from two seasons ago has got to be one of the most early-TCWy things in early TCW. Then again, Echo and Fives go on to be very important pretty much right at the end of the series, so having so much of their stories be told so early may actually cause a theoretical audience to have forgotten who they are by the time the Citadel, Umbara, Biochip Conspiracy and Bad Batch arcs come around… Perhaps you could alternatively just keep Rookies separate, early on in the show, then combine Clone Cadets and ARC Troopers with Clone Cadets being clearly framed as some kind of flashback before ARC Troopers. That lines up with how the episodes were released.
• Your season 1 and 2 seem like a lot of fun, which is surprising considering the original first two seasons of this show.
• With The Deserter, could it make any sense at all to combine it with the Gregor bit of the Void arc? Cut is a Clone Trooper who doesn’t want to be, whereas Gregor rediscovers that he’s a Clone Commando and embraces it, so there’s some thematic potential. That or just leave the B-plot in. Your plan to concentrate Rex’s development in the latter half of the show seems wise to me, though.
• Trimming Onderon is definitely a good idea. I remember feeling that arc dragged when I first watched the show.
• Any excuse to include the excellent Anakin/Obi-Wan conversation from the Utapau arc is good in my book.
• It’s a shame that Bad Batch uses the updated Anakin model and thus is forced so late because it doesn’t feel particularly tense or important.
• I don’t recall Ventress’ bounter hunter chronology well enough to really comment on the changes. I wouldn’t be super concerned about Boba being soft though, because we see in Mando that he’s a fairly chill guy with a moral code of some kind, even if he has done some dirty work for Darth Vader and Jabba in the past.