Which isn’t too far out of scale for physical activities in the real world. There are about a million high school-level football players in the US, compared to about 1,700 players in the NFL.
The football analogy is better when comparing NFL to the Earth’s population. That gives one NFL player for every 4,700 humans. The Jedi are more like one per 1,000,000,000,000 Republic citizens. It would be like Earth having 0.0001 NFL player.
And the SW analogy world in which almost all NFL players, top college players, and HS players with obvious gifts were killed a few years back, and there is no current youth system teaching the game identifying those with natural gifts.
Suddenly the former benchwarmer is the best prospect to train up.
There’s no Lukes knocking down your door.
She’ll be like me and running. I can (and once did) train hard and finish a marathon. Only with very dedicated training. But no matter how hard long and smart I trained I would never qualify for Boston. Let alone be an elite. Then again I would be lots better at running than the average schlub my age. Running against them I’d be great!
My only thought was: “You’re a fucking GENERAL and this is how you prepared for a diplomatic meeting?” Generals might not be master politicians but they’re not ignorant of politics and aren’t incompetent at them.
I guess this is the inevitable setup for when she disobeys orders only to appear in the nick of time to save the day.
Same thought. Also that this live action version seems both sweeter and a lot less competent than the animated version.
I’m enjoying it so far. I’ve only seen a couple of episodes of the Clone Wars and none of Rebels, and I seem to be following along OK, while probably missing a lot of Easter eggs. Like others have said, I know some of the setup for Ashoka through nerd osmosis.
If I wanted to watch Rebels, would I need to watch all of the Clone Wars first?
Not much direct connection between Clone Wars and Rebels.
Apart from knowing who Ahsoka is (which you obviously already do), you don’t really need Clone Wars as a prerequisite for Rebels. You might miss one or two references, but nothing essential to understanding the story.
Just as an aside, I enjoyed Rebels more than I did Clone Wars. I mean, Clone Wars was pretty good, but it meandered a bit, and there were a lot of filler episodes. Rebels is in general more tightly written, and its storyline is much closer to being a straight-line narrative. I find it the best of the Star Wars animated series.
It’s often been noted that, for an animated show ostensibly aimed at kids, there’s a whole lot of darkness in Clone Wars, and also in Rebels. Betrayal, torture, murder, brainwashing, psychological trauma, genocide, all sorts of good, wholesome topics for kids.
Ahsoka’s Clone War arc in particular though was powerful.
That’s true, and watching the whole of Clone Wars does let you see her growth from annoying teen sidekick to badass Jedi warrior. There are probably curated episode lists out there somewhere that would enable one to follow that storyline without getting all the irritating “let’s focus on the droids now” arcs.
Edited to add: I agree with DigitalC below. The last three or four episodes of Clone Wars, which are pretty much all about Ahsoka, are magnificent.
The clone wars at its best is far superior to rebels, but it is not consistent and there are lots of barely tolerable filler episodes. It ends on a VERY HIGH note though. I am not liking Ahsoka in this, she is acting like what someone pretending to be a Jedi master would act. I did love her flight suit though.
So for someone completely unfamiliar with Clone Wars/Rebels, what’s the deal with Ahsoka’s fleshy head protuberances? From the brief shots I saw from the animated series, I thought it was supposed to be some kind of head scarf around her actual hair, but it turns out it’s actually part of her noggin. Does it have any purpose? Is it just another weird alien thing like the Twi’lek head tentacles? And the helmet of her spacesuit made zero sense - it must take minutes to carefully tuck each protuberance into its own pocket.
And speaking of Twi’leks, I concur, Hera is a terrible general. She looks goofy with those flight googles on her head, she doesn’t know how to behave in a meeting with the civilian government, she’s far too trusting of people she’s investigating. I think transferring these characters from the animated series is turning out to be a failure.
My Disney+ actually had just such a playlist available in the lead-up to the new series. All the key episodes of Clone Wars, at least.
Sabine trying and failing to pull that cup is the most relatable Star Wars scene ever.
Interesting thing I hadn’t noticed but should have - the overwhelming majority of the cast are women. Ahsoka Tano, Sabine Wren, Hera Syndulla, Mon Mothma, Morgan Elsbeth, and Shin Hati.
Only Baylan Skoll, and later Ezra Bridger* and Grand Admiral Thrawn, are men.
*Ezra may feasibly not appear at all, outside of his hologram
Enjoying the show, but I think Jacen was a bad idea and I had forgotten about him from Rebels. Hybrid babies is a Trek thing, not a Star Wars thing. Or at least it shouldn’t be, IMO. If they wanted to give Hera a kid with Kanan, they should have found some orphan tike on a devastated planet.
They could have adopted Ezra!
Jacen, unlike Sabine, likely has some greater than average natural Force talent. And interest. The character may be a throw away in this show but I’d be surprised to not see a teen to young adult Jacen character being utilized in a future show. The throw away here gives options later.