Star Wars trailers
Okay, I get distracted for a little while and suddenly there’s new stuff in the Star Wars universe. I can feel the geek in me slipping away…
But at least I woke up in time to get my geek on…
As most people know already, there are two Star Wars TV shows in the works, one live action and one computer animated. The latter of those is much closer to completion, and it’s release is still over a year out. But on the official Star Wars website, they’ve released a trailer for the “Clone Wars” show, and it blows me away. This series looks like it will be awesome. It covers, as the name implies, the Clone Wars, which begin at the end of Episode II: Attack of the Clones and end in Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. There was a short cartoon series run on the Cartoon Network (approximately 5 minute episodes totalling 2 hours), that covered some of that war, and this series will fill in the gaps. All the major characters seem to be involved: Obi-Wan Kenobi, Anakin Skywalker, Padme Amidala-Skywalker, Mace Windu, Yoda, Darth Sidious, Darth Tyrannus (Count Dooku), and General Grievous, plus popular characters introduced outside of the movies like Dirge and Asajj Ventress. The action looks great, the music is cool (in the trailer… of course that’s all John Williams), and the story is apparently realistic (within the SW universe, anyway). In some interviews, series’ heads had this to say:
Filoni: One of the things I always use as an example for the crew is that in the Cartoon Network version, we see Mace Windu take out 500 battle droids, which is really cool, but I remember the Battle of Geonosis and they got punked pretty hard. If Mace could do that, they would have won that battle in five minutes. The real tangible thing that we had to build into The Clone Wars was that, like it or not, the Jedi start to die. And that’s a big responsibility. So we had to make them vulnerable people. Mace says they’re keepers of the peace, not soldiers — we have to show how war was a challenging thing for them to fight.
George gave me a rule about the battle droids where a Jedi can take out about 20 standard battle droids, about 10-15 super battle droids, but a Jedi versus a destroyer droid is a push because of the shield — Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan run into that. So they have to think to solve these problems to get around these droids. Dooku’s constantly trying to entrap and ensnare them and to take more and more of them out. So I don’t have a Justice League of Jedi — I don’t have them do anything that Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan, Yoda, or Luke Skywalker didn’t do.
I like that the Jedi are vulnerable. It’s not fun to watch them succeed if they’re not. Very much looking forward to that show.
In related news, there’s a new Star Wars video game on the horizon called “The Force Unleashed” in which you play Darth Vader’s Secret Apprentice in the largely unexplored time period between Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, and Episode IV: A New Hope (or just plain “Star Wars” for those who can’t keep the episodes straight — Dad). Playing a Sith apprentice is a new approach for the games, if I remember correctly, and that means someone who is willing to tap into the raw destructive abilities of the Force, which means some major cool-looking effects and butt-whoopings are about to ensue. Catch a glimpse in the trailer. This is the first game produced by the new alignment of Industrial Light and Magic (the movie effects wizards) with LucasArts game production team, so I expect to be blown away, and the trailer does nothing to dampen those expectations (unfortunately, I also expect to have to run a pretty high end machine to play this, but that’s a different problem).
Technorati Tags: Star Wars, Clone Wars, video games, television shows, trailers, George Lucas
Tags: music, star wars, tv, video
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May 20th, 2008 at 9:08 pm
[...] the basics: as I said back in August… As most people know already, there are two Star Wars TV shows in the works, one live action [...]