Lucasfilm has released its unfinished Star Wars: The Clone Wars episodes in full, which is great if you don’t mind the incomplete animations.
The Star Wars prequel trilogy wasn’t especially well-liked, but the same isn’t true of Expanded Universe spin-off material. The animated Star Wars: The Clone Wars series was a critically acclaimed award-winner, gaining enough of a following to warrant six full seasons. Now it turns out that Lucasfilm made more content than it could even fit it into the show: As part of a final send-off to The Clone Wars, Lucasfilm has released four unfinished episodes at StarWars.com for fans to enjoy. And enjoy it they will, provided they don’t mind sitting through all the incomplete animations.
You see, while these are technically four full episodes, they only consist of the story reel and audio. That means character models aren’t quite complete, with heads and limbs occasionally disconnecting from their bodies, while various placeholders exist for animators to address later. (My personal favorite being the giant, temporary message hanging over the planet Utapau.) Regardless, there’s a certain pleasure in the behind-the-scenes feels of these episodes. Even better, they address plot points the show never had time for, such as the fallout of Ahsoka leaving the Jedi Order.
These episodes are also significant because they represent Lucasfilm’s final Expanded Universe content. Now that Disney is rebooting Star Wars‘ extended canon, these are the last episodes to receive George Lucas’ seal of approval. That’s a pretty significant turning point, and it’s nice that to see these episodes won’t just be buried in a Star Wars archive somewhere.
The new Lucasfilm series, Star Wars: Rebels, officially premieres next week. While there’s a possibility the new show will be linked to previous Clone Wars episodes, the extent of this connection remains to be seen.
