Two episodes of Star Wars: The Clone Wars came out today and I have to say, I was pretty surprised. Although I enjoyed the movie, it certainly was lacking a little bit, and I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that the stories were tailored for a 22-minute TV format and the movie was 3 episodes scotch taped together.
But in this 22-minute format, this show kicks a lot of ass.
The premiere episode, Ambush, centered around Yoda and his work trying to convince the Toydarians to join the Republic in the war against the Separatists. Unfortunately for Yoda and his entourage of bad-ass clone troopers, Asajj Ventress crashes the party with an entire battalion of battle droids.
The episode does a great job of mixing the serious side of Yoda from the prequels and the more playful side of him that we see in Empire. In fact, most of the musical cues in this episode were from Empire’s soundtrack.
Best moment in this episode? When Yoda comes face to face with Ventress and pretty much laughs at her. She was out of her league and Yoda made her realize it pretty quick.
As entertaining as I thought this episode was, it was the second episode, Rising Malevolence, that was the best the entire 3D Clone Wars series has had to offer to date. The episode centers around a new weapon that General Grievous and Count Dooku have developed on a flagship that they’re trying to keep secret from the Republic.
It’s an Ion Cannon and using it, they tear Plo Koon and his entire fleet to shreds.
In order to keep the secret, Dooku and Grievous order a hunting party to destroy all of the escape pods that made it out of the capital ships before their destruction. Most of this episode plays out in an escape pod with Plo Koon and a few of his Clone troopers waiting their eventual death, watching pod after pod around them get breached by the Seperatists. Though the episode was pretty kid-friendly, it reminded me a lot of really cool episodes of The Outer Limits or some really cool Sci-Fi Channel original movies.
The other half of the episode is about Anakin and Ahsoka, working their hardest to find Master Plo and his men before they die.
This episode isn’t a one off and really kicks off the beginning of a larger story and that’s really what I’m hoping for for this series. I’ve had enough of TV shows where there doesn’t have to be any specific order you watch them in, I like shows that raise the stakes just a little bit with each successive episode. (Not that I watch a lot of shows, but you get the idea.) The promo’s for the next episode center around Anakin leading the charge to destroy this new weapon.
We’ll see how that turns out.
If you’re interested in checking this out and have no idea how to watch it any other way, the episodes will be available on iTunes the day after airing at $1.99 a pop. If you can wait a week, you can stream them for free on www.starwars.com and www.cartoonnetwork.com, but only two episodes will ever be available at a time.
www.StarWars.com is also offering comics that lead into each weeks episode written by Pablo Hidalgo and a rotating slate of artists. I checked out the first one and it was fairly interesting, we’ll see where it goes from here.