Why You Should Be Excited for Star Wars Rebels

Excuse my fanboy geek out party, but here it goes.

I am pumped for Star Wars Rebels, and you should be too! One of the biggest reasons for my excitement is the entirely original cast! Sure, we all love Obiwan Kenobi and Yoda, and I think some people out there even like Anakin, but I found their animated series to be missing something. It’s not that the familiar characters of The Clone Wars series didn’t have plenty of history to expand on, but their fates and personalities were mostly locked in place. Worse yet, their fates were locked into tragedy! It’s hard to root for the hero when you know he’s going to turn into a child murderer. The best The Clone Wars could hope for is to help justify the jarring, uneven events of episode 3. I found myself struggling to give a care about almost anything that happened in the mid prequel timeline, except for one shining beacon of light.

Amidst all the banality of The Clone Wars was Ahsoka, a likeable character with a clean slate! Would she face a tragic and/or heroic death? Would she change sides and join the Separatists? Her final story arc was easily the best storytelling the series had to offer purely because it was a character we cared about thrust into dire circumstances with an unwritten conclusion! Watching her character grow, and being able to ponder on her unknown fate was what kept me coming back to the series, and slogging through all the storylines that foolishly exempted her, of which there were many.

Now, take That enjoyment of watching a new character grow and change over meaningful story arcs, and multiply it to an entire cast of characters! For those not in the know, Greg Weisman, the main creative mind behind the fantastic Disney animated series Gargoyles and lead writer of the equally fantastic and far too short lived Young Justice, is also the lead writer for Rebels. I was excited for the new series before I found this out, but afterwards, my hype train made the jump to hyper space!

Weisman has a way of introducing cool characters, and then slowly revealing their back stories in ways that make his series’ infinitely more complex and exciting. Think of the history of Demona and Macbeth in Gargoyles. These two characters, when introduced separately, were immediately engaging, but the reveal of their history together took their stories to a whole other level of sophistication, on top of making all their future encounters significantly more dramatic! It also makes a subsequent viewing of the Gargoyles series more insightful. Artemis from Young Justice is also a great example of this, as her family history is slowly revealed over the course of the series.

Weisman is a master of foreshadowing and engaging character building. Now take his talent for building complex characters, and stick that smack in the middle of the Star Wars universe, especially one of the most exciting time periods in the saga, with the rise of the underdog Rebellion and the full might of the Galactic Empire. The potential for Empire Strikes Back levels of action and drama is overwhelming, and a majority of Star Wars fans would agree that Empire is the best the franchise has to offer in terms of dramatic reveals, character arcs, and relationship building. On that note, the head writer of Empire Strikes Back, Lawrence Kasdan, is also the head screenwriter for Episode 7, giving me a great deal of hope for  the future of the film franchise as well! But I’ll leave that for another post.

Published on May 7, 2014 by Alex Kolesar | 6 Comments on Why You Should Be Excited for Star Wars Rebels