While I’m always trying to be optimistic about new media things, sometimes my depressing nature gets to me. I don’t mind the art style: yeah, it’s oddly stylized, but I don’t say it’s automatically bad or good on acocunt of it. I liked Team America: World Police, so I can hardly complain about a similar puppet style demi-claymation thing.
But leaving art style aside, I do like what I see in the previews/promos. Then again, I at least wastryingto hold out hope for the recent movie, so I may be overly-optimistic. Thoughts?
I’d kinda prefer a TV series based on (what little I know about) The Force Unleashed, actually. An apprentice of Darth Vader doing Very Bad Things, with no Anakin, Padme, Yoda, etc. Sounds like a winner to me.
Kinda dead thread, but what I’d LURVS ME TOTLY to see would be a Bounty Hunters themed live-action TV show. Show the "semi) Dark Side of the galaxy, with Bounty Hunters taking down criminals, gangsters, serial killers, and (for season enders) Jedi alike. Give them a nifty ship, a decent budget, and you’d have something like Firefly but, with Star Wars.
I quite enjoyed the two episodes shown last night in the premiere. The first contained almost nothing that tied into the recent movie and the second did. Good times and my eight year old was with me the entire way.
Heck, I like it enough to pay for the season pass on iTunes. For $40 I’ll have the entire first season delivered to my desktop.
The first two episodes were OK (not amazing, but worth a look). But, I’m worried about next week, because I noticed in the previews the most horrible character ever developed in ANY fictional tale (book, movie, cartoon).
Yes: Jar-Jar Binks
The only way I’ll sit through any more episodes with JJB in them is if in the first 10 minutes he gets skewered on a spear and is roasted alive. THAT would be entertaining.
I assume they focus-grouped this series, right? Did the test audience say “Yes, George, give us more Jar-Jar”??? Who LIKEs this character?
About 2/3’s of the live-action movies weren’t any good, and I heard bad things about the animated movie as well. Maybe if Lucas keeps out of it, someone else can make something of all the potential there. Personally, I have no intention of wasting more time with Star Wars, and I say that as a formerly wide-eyed 11-year-old who was AWESTRUCK by “A New Hope”. . .collected the cards, bought the comics, get the t-shirt, etc.
That’s the plan, apparently. Though nobody has heard any real details, popular expectation is that the live-action TV show will be exactly this.
The animated Clone Wars is aimed at kids a lot more definitively than the movies were (hence the outright hatred of it from the adult fans), and this live-action show (it’s being written now, probably for production next year, and broadcast in 2010) is squarely aimed at adults, and will take a grittier edge to it than even the movies had.
Anyone else watching it? My two boys, ages 12 and 9, love it, and I’ve caught most of the episodes with them. I’d give the show a B or B- overall. The clone troopers are ridiculously red-shirted (it’s a rare mission that more than one or two of them make it back alive), but all in all the episodes are fun and the CGI is pretty good. The episode with the Irish-sounding lemur-people actually tackled the dilemma of pacifism during wartime on a semi-intellectual level that surprised me.
I’ve enjoyed it quite a bit so far. I’d like to see them spend more time away from Anakin/Padme/Obi Wan/Anakin’s incredibly obnoxious padawan, though. The best episodes, IMO, have focused on secondary characters. It might be that there’s more freedom with them–after all, we know that Ani/Padme/Ben need to survive through to Episode III, and their personalities are pretty much fixed. A secondary character, like the clone troopers or the Mon Cal jedi from the Lair of Grievous episode, offers the chance for real drama and development. (Sadly, this also means that they’re expendable, like that same Mon Cal jedi–I think he’s been my favorite character in the whole series.)
On the bright side, we absolutely, positively know that Anakin’s padawan is going to die at some point. I’m kinda looking forward to that one.
