Looking out into the world of the internet, what I realized is that there is almost no content that deals with the most successful and important movie franchise ever, George Lucas’s Star Wars movie franchise.
Upon closer examination, oh my God, there are millions of webpages and blogs, YouTube and Reddit channels dedicated to this franchise. So what could we possibly offer to add to the great heap of Star Wars analysis, fan fiction, anger, etc. that already exists? Maybe nothing.
I grew up Star Wars, it was a constant in my life for the first decade of my existence. And while I grew up in the original trilogy era, I was at the midnight show for the Phantom Menace and saw all the prequel trilogy in the theaters on opening day. I have my own issues with the prequels but I think if you divorce yourself from your expectations and increase your tolerance for the beginning of CGI and the slapstick nature of Episode 1, there is some good Star Wars there. I completely understand the position many of my contemporaries take on the prequels, I just don’t share that sentiment.
I currently own all 7 episodic movie and “Rogue One” on home disk. I enjoy the comics, the new novels, and other sources of Star Wars media. I play Star Wars with the 3.75″ action figures with my two young sons almost daily. We have quite the collection with several hundred figures obtained over the past several years, but they are toys and are treated like toys. I make little dioramas and play-set for them to use in their own extended universe where Ahsoka is friends with Snaggletooth…who is apparently a Jedi according to the 2 year old.
Right now I want to focus on an aspect of Star Wars media that, while it has had somewhat of a renaissance as of late, has largely been neglected and ignored both by Lucasfilm and by fans. This show and supporting blog is going to be an in depth exploration of ALL Star Wars cartoons produced by Lucasfilms. We will explore them for production style and value, impact on the Star Wars universe, morals (if present), placement in the Star Wars timeline, supporting materials (anything referenced by the cartoons), and anything else we can think of. We are going to go on this journey in chronological order and we are going to look at everything we can find.
We are going to start at the beginning…the much maligned Star Wars Holiday Special cartoon short — and move on from there.
So I hope that now that you’ve found this blog and show, you’ll stay with us through the Holiday Special, through Droid and Ewoks…Through the Clone Wars (Tartakovsky’s) and then the other Clone Wars where we will adopt a slightly different format for ease of writing and plot, and then Rebels. At the time of this post, Rebels is still in the middle of the fourth and final season. If there is another cartoon after Rebels, we will also cover that, but currently this new cartoon is only a rumor.
So onto the first episode, where we will watch the Holiday Special and summarize the cartoon within the piece and discuss how it fits into the greater Star Wars universe.
–Matt
