Dave Filoni is the man in charge of making The Clone Wars the best show on television. Instrumental since day one, he writes and directs episodes, works with the actors, and keeps the look and feel of the show moving in the right direction.

We’ve talked quite a few times over the years, and this time I caught up with him in San Diego during Comic-Con.

In the interview, Dave talks about the season premiere, aludes to Ahsoka’s fate, and professes his love for Doctor Who.

The new season starts tomorrow, Friday, September 16 on Cartoon Network. You can read my review of the premiere here.

(And special thanks to JawaJames from Club Jade (GONK) for helping me with the transcription of this interview.)

Big Shiny Robot!: How are you?

Dave Filoni: I’m good. You know, it’s a big one this year, more people than ever before. It’s exciting to see so many people into these types of stories and movies. I always think Comic-Con is the big reason why you get Thor, you get the Iron Mans, Green Lantern, without seeing the support, so you know, it’s exciting.

BSR!: Is this a big source of support for you guys?

DF: I think so. It’s always important to come out, to talk to fans directly, to show them directly what we’re working on, to let them be involved that way. This year, I made sure we brought a lot of clips – didn’t want to be coy, didn’t want to show just one thing. For the people who wait in line and pay a lot of money to come down here, I said let’s make it worth their while and Cary Silver, the producer, agreed. I think things were really well received.

BSR!: The footage you showed – I don’t want to talk too much about it, because I know you’ll just give me vague, dodgy answers…

DF: You never know, I gave away a lot yesterday.

BSR!: Really?

DF: I thought so, for me, yeah.

BSR!: It seemed that in the run up to season three, you guys were giving everything away. It felt that way. I’m counting off the press release: there’s the mysteries of the Force story arc, and this story arc, etc. You could almost count all the story arcs before the season even starts. Except for the Wookiee one, that was a big secret.

DF: And that has to do with, there was no footage at that time. [laughs] More than anything else.

BSR!: One question I asked you at Celebration that I am going to ask you again now because it was a great questions and it kept me guessing completely: What sort of movies have you been going back to reference or homage this next season? I know last season, you said Predator, which seemed so bizarre to me. But now you see the Wookiee Hunt episodes, and I get it: Predator. But it was nice guessing about that. What about this season?

DF: This season, I feel like we’ve hit a really strong stride with The Clone Wars where we have a great understanding now of what it takes to make a really great episode. I think it just depends on which kind of story we are doing. I went back and actually watched the films like Chinatown because I felt like we could have done better when we did the political corruption episodes that we did. We’re not doing very many of those story anymore, if any, but I thought, “That’s a really great example of how you do it.” A lot of ways, too, with Yojimbo, there’s a lot of root corruption going on, which is a motivator for the story. A lot of Sanjiro, too. Kurosawa is always an influence. It was an influence on George [Lucas], so it’s always good to go back and stay up on those films. Joel [Aron] and I are constantly referencing The Third Man in regards to lighting. You got to push the lighting.

BSR!: You did a Harry Lime-less The Third Man episode…

DF: Yeah, kinda. So those are the kind of things I’ve been looking at. And more popular culture, I’m paying attention to what a lot of other people are doing, a lot of other people attempting CG TV series, and I’ve been going to the summer films. It’s fun and you never know what’s going to influence you or not. I watch Game of Thrones, and thought that was great. It was really interesting to see how they told that story. Always watching… Doctor Who, I’ve been watching quite a bit. I found a lot of relativity between what we’ve done and what they’re doing. They’re trying to do this science fiction story epic on a TV scale, but they want to make it feel bigger and I think it does. It’s interesting to see because we both deal with logic that can be difficult at times. How is the audience going to understand what the hero is going through and how they come out of it?

BSR!: Like ‘Blink’?

DF: That episode was fantastic.

BSR!: ..where you could struggle with what the hero was dealing with without seeing the hero.

DF: Right there. The Doctor wasn’t even the main character. It was very interesting.

BSR!: With Season Three, since last we talked, I don’t want to talk too much about it, but my blood is up about it: it’s the continuity stuff. How can you make a definitive statement to say this is this, and that was that. Can you?

DF: [laughs] I don’t know that I can. I make my TV series and it works with George Lucas’ films. That’s the intention of it, and that’s George’s intention. There are all kinds of great stories being made in Star Wars. I think people underestimate what a massive operation it really is, and all the creative talents coming to it. In all the time in little ways, we’re doing things to stay in line with each other. I think it’s a growing process but at the end of the day, my task is, “Does George like this show?” and he really likes the show. That’s the beginning, middle, end of it for me. And I like the show. We’ve really grown in making this series. It’s just a process. I understand when people think that things have gone out of continuity, but we’re trying to serve as a story and tell stories that we need to tell. When we can fit things together, we do. When we can’t, we can’t shy away from doing what must be done. That’s about how it is.

BSR!: How much regular input does George have? Is he still in all the writing meetings, pitching stories?

DF: He’s letting go to a certain degree, but I always go over all the stories with him. He comes in and watches all the color final with me. But I have a lot of oversight over the whole thing. Christian [Taylor] and I have been handling the writing in a major way. That’s the whole purpose of us. George entrusts us with this project and we make it the way that he taught me. We fly a bit more on our own now but any question that I have, I can always just drop him a line. It’s not difficult at all to get a hold of him. Like I said, it’s always his universe. It’s not that difficult – to stay in keeping with what he wants. The filmmaker’s logic that we’ve learned and we apply, it works on the show.

BSR!: As far as the stuff in season four coming up, the first arc is the Mon Calamari stuff. What challenges did you guys have? A lot of people are going to compare it to the two minutes they saw in the Genndy Tartakovsky series. How much of it was patterned after that? Did you look at that much?

DF: No, we really didn’t. We don’t refer to that series really ever. It’s not a point of reference for us. It’s not to say that we don’t enjoy it. I watched it when it came on and I enjoyed it, but we’re doing the cinematic version of it for our series. We had to create these cities and the culture. It’s funny – I’ll say it’s a completely different thing. It might look really similar by nature of the subject matter.

BSR!: You’ve got that one two-minute episode, and maybe four lines of dialogue, and it seems similar insofar as the setting and some of the people involved.

DF: Absolutely, Kit Fisto is a no brainer. So I think in regards to that, there were some similarities. They used Kit Fisto, let’s use Kit Fisto and honor that idea. I like the designs they had done for the Quarren soldiers, so I instructed the designer, Killian [Plunkett], “You should look at this stuff and what Hasbro had done,” and keep ours in line with that. The Mon Cal soldiers, we made them a lot more high tech looking than what had been seen before because they seem like a pretty high tech people. We see Mon Calamari star cruisers. It’s all kinds of decisions you make when you’re making your film. I think both exist nicely – they’re both exciting stories to watch.

BSR!: You mentioned last night, Boba Fett. He’s never been necessarily my favorite character. Fetts always tend to have very anticlimactic endings, but we’re seeing Boba Fett grow on the show. From where we’ve seen him last on The Clone Wars, the next time we see him is standing next to Jabba in A New Hope. You’ve got a lot of room to work there. How far do you see yourself taking the evolution of Boba Fett on this show?

DF: I think we really warmed up to Boba and the concept of playing with his character. We did the arc in season two. Just as Ahsoka got older, Boba will be a little bit older. I think that opened up different doors for us. He’s a really interesting character. What I like about him the most is that when I get into a story with him, we can really play up that Dollars trilogy, Sergio Leone vibe. I really enjoy that. There’s such a great feeling to those old Westerns.

BSR!: He’s got a The Outlaw Josey Wales thing. You guys killed my family, and I’m gonna screw all of you up.

DF: That idea – where does his morality really lie? At what point does he decide that he’ll just do the job, or if he realizes that the job is not morally correct, does he take the job? I think that those are some interesting concepts for him to struggle with, especially growing up in the shadow of Jango Fett, who was a really well known bounty hunter. There’s room there, and I think we approach it respectfully when we get into it on the show.

BSR!: Are you guys going to be exploring much of Boba’s sense of that every time he’s staring at a clone, he’s looking the mirror at both himself and his dad?

DF: I don’t think we get too much into that in the future. We looked at that when he was a lot younger because it is interesting. The clones themselves are really interesting, I have to say. The idea that we’ve been able to give them personalities, to be very individual. You really feel that Rex, Fives, and Hardcase are different clones. Dee Baker is a testament to how good he is with his voice but it is interesting that people accept them as different. People get very attached to those individual personalities. The clones are fantastic to work with. We’re always doing a big arc story with them.

BSR!: Dee mentioned that the big arc that he got to do bothered him – there was some moral quandaries.

DF: Very emotional, yeah.

BSR!: Can you talk at all about the sorts of stuff that we might see that might give Dee pause.

DF: [Laughs] I don’t know if I can. It’s a testament to Dee’s commitment to the characters that he got so involved in portraying them. He really allowed himself to embody these soldiers out there. It’s something that I always take seriously: a lot of servicemen and women come up to us at conventions and say they really like the portrayal of the soldiers, and the clones, and the dilemmas you show they go through. It’s an important aspect of the show.

Again, I think people really like, say, Captain Rex. He’s almost the everyman on the show. He doesn’t have the super abilities that Anakin and Obi-wan have. If Rex is going to get out of a situation, he’s going to do it through guts and muscle and his wits. That’s really compelling, and it’s really draining when we have him in these extreme situations – how does Rex get out of them? I think the audience is always a little more on edge because I’ve shown in the show that I’m not afraid to take one of them out. That was true with Echo, and a lot of people felt like Echo should have had a bigger, more heroic death. Unfortunately, that’s not always how that works, is it? He’s doing his duty, like Obi-wan says in Revenge of the Sith, “They’re doing their jobs so we can do ours.” It’s a hard lesson, but I think Echo would say that he died giving his all as a character, trying to save that group, get them off the Citadel. And I forget that Dee’s all those guys. I feel bad – I tell him that I keep killing off his characters, but at least he’s still there, so he’s never going to run out.

BSR!: One of the things I’ve noticed you’re very good at, particularly with Ahsoka – something happens to Ahsoka to take her out of the story, whether she dies or moves on, or escapes Order 66. I’ve got a thousand possibilities of what can happen. But the most likely scenario is that she is probably going to die. I think that’s an expectation that everybody has and I think you’re very good at playing with that expectation and putting Ahsoka in these situations where “Oh, is she… no, it’s not” – you get really concerned. I’ve got worked up watching Ahsoka get into situations that I thought she’d never get out of. Anakin throws her into the same situations, and I feel that the second I put that guard down with “Oh, she’s safe, that’s never gonna happen”, that’s when she’s going to get it.

DF: She’s a very interesting story. I’m really excited about some of the things we’re doing with her and her development as a character. When she first shows up now when you go back and watch The Clone Wars movie, she feels so young. Her behavior and her attitude: so young. And now, after the end of ‘Wookiee Hunt,’ she’s a much more mature different character. I think it’s a credit to Ashley [Eckstein] and her performances as Ahsoka that has changed and gotten wiser over the years and how she portrays her and the writing of Ahsoka which has changed. Our ability to take this girl, which some fans thought, “I’m not too sure about this character” or “She annoyes me”, and now people are like “Please don’t kill her! Please don’t do that” and “What’s going to happen to her?” It’s great that they’re concerned about her. They’re concerned for Rex, they’re concerned for her. But you never know. I work on that dilemma all the time because I want to make sure that whatever happens, it will be proper.

BSR!: I think everybody’s excited to see what that is, whatever it is.

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Here’s another interview we did at Comic-Con about The Clone Wars. This time, we spoke with Dee Bradley Baker. For those unfamiliar, Dee is the voice of every single Clone on the show, as well as Bossk and all kinds of other monsters and anywhere else they can use him.

Dee is also a great fan of the show and offered us some tantalizing tidbits about future arcs. (Who knows how fast we’ll see them, though.)

Here’s our interview with him from The Clone Wars Season 4 premiere event:

Perhaps the most interesting tidbit he dropped in that video was that Walter Murch (THX-1138, Apocalypse Now, The Godfather) was directing an episode of the Umbara arc. It’s been long known he was directing an episode, but knowing that he’s directing an episode full of war and challenging Clone trooper action and emotion is incredibly thrilling to the film buff in me.

Then, we have the interview of Dee that we did at Comic-Con where he elaborates on the Umbara arc quite a bit. The more I hear about it, the more it seems like this story is going to be the benchmark Season 4 will be held up to. (And special thanks to JawaJames from Club Jade (GONK) for helping me with the transcription of this interview.)

Big Shiny Robot! So, what can’t you tell us?

Dee Bradley Baker: A lot of it is the same stuff we keep saying. It’s more cinematic than previous seasons. It’s more substantial, it’s more of everything that I personally really like about the series. There’s a four episode arc that has got mostly clones and it’s very intense. It’s stunningly good.

BSR!: That’s what Joel [Aron] said. There’s a lot more on this season.

DBB: Yeah. I like it – you got clones, you got action, you got stuff happening. That’s what I like.

BSR!: Do you know what they’re showing at the panel?

DBB: Today, they’re going to show you snippets – chunks of scenes that are coming up in the new season. A bit from the underwater sequence, that is from the opening arc. There are more two and three episode arcs that fit beautifully together into movies, like the Nightsisters trio from last year. I loved that particularly, and I got to see that shown as a movie, back to back. To me, you increasingly see the show becoming – like these three little pieces lock together perfectly into movies. Maybe that’s leading to something, I don’t know. It seems to be, to me, going that way. It’s becoming more like, “I’m watching a movie.” It’s not a cartoon, it’s not like anything else on television. It’s a Star Wars movie, is what I’m watching. So there’s an underwater sequence, an ice planet sequence that looks quite beautiful, and I can’t remember what the other sequences are.

BSR!: I was wondering if there was anything specific about it where you could talk about your involvement. One thing I’m curious about, and a lot of people know, is that you’re the voice of the clones, but you do so much more than that on the show. You did Bossk, what else have you done on the show?

DBB: Bossk, Queen Karina…

BSR!: Those were good episodes.

DBB: God, I loved those episodes. The Geonosian episodes were really cool.

BSR!: Is there anything from season four that you’ve voiced that’s not a clone that you can talk to us about?

DBB: It’s hard for me to remember. The thing is, that I’ve recorded the stuff like a year ago, and I haven’t seen it, except for the four part story arc that I just saw.

BSR!: And you guys have been recording in the past month or two, right?

DBB: We pretty much record something, maybe once, maybe twice a month. It’s spaced out but it’s constantly going. I wanted to get up to the Ranch to see some of these things before I came down here. I’m not on a The Clone Wars panel per se, but I knew there would be some interviews and things. I want to have some idea of what’s coming down the pipe. Because normally as voice actors, we don’t get to see anything until it airs, if then. I usually don’t even have time to watch it if it airs. Clone Wars, though, that’s one of my shows I absolutely watch, because my eleven-year-old absolutely demands it too, so we both watch it together.

BSR!: I do Clone Wars with my nine-year-old.

DBB: There’s some really awesome stuff. As the story continues to evolve, as we get closer to episode III, the question of what happens to Ahsoka and what happens to Rex – that’s what I want to see.

BSR!: Here’s a hypothetical story question for you: You’re the voice of the clones, so you have to think about all this stuff. Do you think they know the details of Order 66 before they’re given it. Do you think they know?

DBB: I, myself, don’t think so. I don’t think Dave has indicated so, but Dave could say more for sure. I don’t think that they know. That’s my guess. But I would say that the tension between the clones and their Jedi masters starts to become apparent in this new season. It’s a shocking moment when the order is called, and all of a sudden it’s like “Clones are killing Jedi? What the? Where did that come from?” But you will begin to see, from what I’ve seen.. okay. They’re starting to say: “Look at this war. Look at this whole setup, look at where we are, look at where this is going.”

BSR!: So maybe they’ve got a sense of it?

DBB: From what I can see, that begins to become… they’re smart fellas. They’re smart, they think on their feet, they’re flexible. They’re not just robots, they’re humans. That’s also a big part of the four part Umbara arc that I just saw. They couldn’t not be thinking this. “Where’s this all headed?” [laughs] I wish I could give you more details.

BSR!: And that’s why I say it would be great if we could do this kind of stuff after screenings. I struggle with “What could I say that he can possibly answer?” Especially since you haven’t necessarily seen everything.

DBB: Oh, I haven’t. Whole episodes, whole arcs.

BSR!: Is that frustrating, working in the dark on something this cool?

DBB: It goes with the territory with most animation. With a few shows like the SpongeBob show, which we record as an ensemble, I feel like I’ve seen a version of it because we all performed it together. Sometimes we have episodes like that here too.

BSR!: There’s some episodes, some of the better episodes, where you’re performing everything by yourself.

DBB: Right, and I feel like I see it as I perform it. I really had to see this particular arc, the Umbara arc, because it really bothered me. I’ve never been bothered by anything that I’ve done in voice acting, by a script or by what’s going on. But what was going on in this particular story arc bothered me. It got to me. In a sense that what these clones were going through, and what they had to endure, and what was going on from their standpoint – it was pretty horrible, and pretty difficult, and I didn’t like going back into that.

BSR!: So, not bothered you as in, “Oh, I didn’t like the script”?

DBB: No, it was awesome, it was fantastic.

BSR!: It bothered you personally, as a performer getting into those characters and that it was taking you to a really dark place.

DBB: Having to bring that kind of stuff up, I don’t usually have to do that. In the stuff I usually do, if it’s intense or dark or difficult, it’s usually just for one character maybe. Here, it’s an entire squad of these guys that are going through this and they have discussions amongst themselves and difficulties about “How are we going to do this? Are we going to do it this way? No, we’re not going to. We can’t do that way, we HAVE to do it this way. No, we can’t do that, it’s against our code, we can’t do that. No, we gotta do it. This is our orders, and we got to do it.” It’s that kind of stuff where I’ve got to bring up the reality of all sides of this argument and then put everyone into the fire, so to speak.

BSR!: Sounds like a lot of fun?

DBB: It’s awesome fun. It’s an awesome challenge and it’s awesome fun. But I personally found it a little aggravating just because of what it brings up in me and that’s unusual. I guess I’m just saying that what these guys go through is uniquely difficult in this particular arc.

BSR!: I can’t wait to see it.

DBB: I wish you could see it. I hope that when you see it, you see it in pristine condition, on a big screen, digitally projected, all four back to back.

BSR!: I wish I could see that too. I saw the season three premiere at the Presidio.

DBB: I’m so proud of that.

BSR!: Those were very good episodes.

DBB: That was awesome.

BSR!: I’m hoping to get an invitation to see the season four premiere, too.

DBB: I do too, and I’ll try to be up there. Actually, I think the premiere is going to be at the Long Beach Aquarium, as I understand it, because it’s the underwater arc. I don’t necessarily know everything, but that’s what they were telling me. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

BSR!: I haven’t been disappointed in the show at all. There’s been a few episodes that lulled a little bit. Overall, the show is still some of the best stuff on TV, period.

DBB: It is. It’s unfortunate, or maybe it’s telling, that the show is really not recognized in a big way by the awards shows. They really pass it over, and I think there’s a lot of political reasons for that. But I think that’s unfortunate, because, like you said, this show is unlike anything else out there, in live action or animation. And not that there aren’t other good shows, but it’s a really unique, remarkable show. And it’s going to get even better.

BSR!: I can’t wait.

DBB: Me too. [laughs]

The new season starts Friday, September 16 on Cartoon Network. You can read my review of the premiere here.

Check back later for an interview with Dave Filoni about Season 4!

In July, at the San Diego Comic-Con, I was able to sit down with Joel Aron, the CG Supervisor for the animated Star Wars show, The Clone Wars. After a long career in feature films for Industrial Light and Magic, Joel made the jump to Lucas Animation to work on The Clone Wars.

Talking to him, he exudes passion for his work, for storytelling, for lighting, for great films, and, above-all, great photography. He’s never seen without a camera around his neck and snaps pictures of everything and portraits of everyone he can get his hands on. (His photography facebook page is a great place to check out his photography work.)

On the show, it’s his job to make sure all of the visuals come together, from design to lighting, all the way down the line. It’s a big job and he seems to fit perfectly into it.

The new season starts Friday, September 16 on Cartoon Network. You can read my review of the premiere here.

(And special thanks to JawaJames from Club Jade (GONK) for helping me with the transcription of this interview.)

We spoke for a long time and here’s the pertinent portions of our conversation:

Big Shiny Robot!: I always feel at disadvantaged with these interviews – because i haven’t seen what you guys are showing. The look of the show is crazy. Every season – you get in and I say “Wow, this was in improvemenr over the movie, wow this is an improvement over season 1.. season 4 looks even better than season 3, and i thought season 3 looked incredible, just from that clip i saw, with the wind on Ahsoka’s parka – stuff like that – it looked incredible. Can we talk a little bit about evolving look of the show & characters?

Joel Aron: Where we left off (episodes 3.16-3.18 [the Chewbacca episodes]) – we have those two episodes and we knew those episodes have to push even harder. we had to push even really hard with the Nightsisters arc, with Savage Opress right into the Wookiee episodes. after that, we realized that we benchmark the sets – the environments. how the sets become characters. It starts all the way back in design. When we were doing the Padawan Lost episode and learning what we could do, at that point, the designs for season four were well underway. We learned that we could do that now – we found ways to get the studios – primarily the studio does most of the work: CGCG in Taiwan, and Singapore does a few episodes as well). CGCG is moving at such a fast click so it’s really hard to get them to do things that are advancements, so we always have to go in such baby steps. It starts with that design.

So you saw the clip with Death Watch with Ahsoka’s parka blowing in the wind? That’s something we learned to do way back at the end of season 1 but it just looked like an inner tube floating around so we knew that when we were designing that episode, it was about the same time we were finishing 3.16 and 3.18, so we knew we could go in and sculpt. Darren Marshall, one of our sculptors, amazing designer – figured out how that could be designed based on how we knew we could animate it and how we could get the studio to do it in a short period of time. Because the biggest hurdle of all of our characters is that we can add whatever we want to it but the fact of the matter is that the schedule is always going to be the same. So it’s like a gamble – how difficult can we make these characters, or how intricate or how dynamic can we make these characters, but know that it has to fit inside that ten week schedule.

It’s ridiculous it’s the biggest challenge.

BSR!: But as you go forward, it seems you have been able to build one thing and it stays in your toolbox, as it were, so you can build onto that as the show goes on. By the time you hit six or seven seasons, it will look like live action…

JA: You know it’s funny, to joke around a lot – we slowly starting to catch up with what I think – having come from a long list of feature films – I really think we’re catching up to that. I think we’ve finally brought the show up to looking like a feature film. A lot of it is environment – not so much the characters, it’s the environment.

BSR: There were shots in season 2, the Geonosian arc, that I wouldn’t be able to tell from the movie if you showed it to me side by side.

JA: Wait until you see what Dave is going to show you in a few hours. (laughs) You’re going to see something in a few hours that is pretty well done, with the exception of the temp score on it from Empire. It’s almost two-and-a-half minutes of action where you are going think you are watching a Star Wars feature film. You’ll know what I’m talking about when you see it.

BSR!: Is it from one episode or is it a conglomeration?

JA: It’s a conglomeration. It’s a story that is being told over several parts. The arc was split up between two studios – this is a really big challenge, with Singapore doing a portion of the arc, and CGCG did another portion, at different times, and they slightly overlapped. So we had to get the two studios to synch up with the look, the action, the characters. Everything had to be synched up. That episode alone was our benchmark for how far we can get into live action, It’s the same thing in the same story arc that you’ll see a space battle. So one’s a ground battle, and one’s a space battle. We feel that with the look of those two, we can do feature-film quality action and now we’re trying to trickle that back down into just even the simple dialogue like you and I talking to make it seem like it’s the feature film. Just as engrossing as it was..

BSR!: There’s certainly an archetype – I think one of the films that is an action film in a lot of ways but has the most interesting-looking conversations is The Professional…or Leon.

JA: Absolutely. It’s one of my all time favorite movies.

BSR!: Just the conversations in it are riveting – just the way they are put together. If you were able to capture that in the dialogue as well as you’ve done with the action. The thing is, for us on the outside looking in, all the stuff looks great. We don’t know what you are up to to show us something more, and you’re setting us up for disappointment eventually because you guys are going to get it perfect, and we’re not going to get…

JA: The answers?

BSR!: I don’t know about that, but… I’m just along for the ride.

JA: Me too. But that’s a good question. Working on season three, we had all these episodes where we tried to sound important – who are we? We’re just sitting here pumping – at Celebration V – pumping up and we knew going in that there were going to be a lot of setted episodes after Christmas, that that was our change. Everything changed at that point. So going back to talk about character, dialogue or involvement into conversation in the set.

To Christian, the lead writer, and Dave’s credit, it all starts with that script. The scripts for season four and the remaining ones of season three that actually aired in season four.

BSR!: About that middle lull in season three that a lot of people seemed to not respond as well to, — the politics episodes. It felt like some of those episodes were from season two, in some ways.

JA: We had to air them at some point. And that’s all Dave and Cary’s decision. Like Jesse [Hildreth, a lighter in Singapore] is for me, I’m Dave’s Merlin – he unleashes me on it, and I make it look beautiful. But the scripts have been so powerful. That clip with Death Watch, we just showed George that whole episode yesterday, even before we screened it for George, we all turned and looked at each other and went “F**, that’s crazy” for 22 minutes.

“That is just insane.” That is the real challenge – you can create all this dialogue, talky-talk stuff, and try to make it intense but to actually have it suck in the audience and keep you focused for 22 minutes and not have it feel like you left anything out or that you need to want more. You’re going to watch these battle episodes we’re talking about, and even the talking episodes, the droid episodes, and you’re going to be sucked in. At the end of that thirty minutes, you’re going to be wanting more. That’s the gist of season four.

BSR!: Looking from the outside looking in, I don’t know how you can do that any better than you already do. So I’m almost worried – I get anxiety in between each episode?

JA: You know what this is? Going back to my very first reaction when I saw my very first episode for the very first time, I heard the narrator and I immediately thought that George wants us to be like a popcorn matinee on a Saturday, and that’s almost what it is. In the beginning, it started to grip everybody and unfortunately it started to dropping you around time and you’re trying to keep up. But now I think we’re getting into these better stories that we have to tell and we’re going to end it with the audience, at the end of each episode, thinking, instead of just wanting. If you leave an episode with too much wanting – like the way Deadwood season three ended, knowing that there wasn’t going to be a season four. They built it so much, leaving the audience wowed, but when you’d find there’s no season four, it was like “Uh?” There’s none of that on our show. The only reason is that we always know where the end point is, and we have to get to that endpoint. It’s just the stories that we tell.

As much as we pumped up season three, I think season four is really fantastic. A lot of writers are new. All the stories are connected. The cinematography is like the feature films. If you saw the Star Wars Insider where I broke down my five greatest influences from movies, and I’m really trying to pull more. Dave has thrown me the keys for the visuals. I’m a Moto GP fan, so it’s like he’s the guy putting the bike together and telling you this is what I got to run with, and I run with it on the track with the team.

This season is going to be torture [for us]. Last season we knew all about Chewbacca but we just had to sit on it for nine months.

BSR!: It’s probably not worth asking but… the payoff for the Darth Maul set up?

JA: (silence)

BSR!: See, it’s not worth asking.

JA: It’s like Ahsoka and her fate. You can keep the hook in the water as long as you want.

BSR!: It’s frustrating…

JA: Especially if you’re a hardcore fan. But he [Dave Filoni] is one of the biggest fans you’ll ever meet. As much as George has been involved with these episodes, it’s really been Dave – all throughout the rest of season three and season four. Our reviews with George, like yesterday, were “Perfect. It’s great. Loved it.” maybe change one line there. But it’s all Dave now, and he’s the biggest fan. Because of that, I think we’re not being asked to do these episodes of kids who need to find the person who tainted their tea.

BSR!: I think that episode could have worked. I watched that episode four times, going “Aww, man, if I had been in the writing room, I could have fixed this episode.”

JA: Even in the editorial room, it was a shark pool.

BSR!: It was so thrown together – it was like The Third Man with no Harry Lime. That’s all it needed, a Harry Lime.

JA: I love that movie. So the fan expectation, where Dave’s driving now – that’s where season four is: All the episodes we’re doing now, Dave will come into my office and start talking, “I’ve been thinking about this one thing and we need to put a lot of focus on these two episodes. This is what we need to think about for this episode.” I’ll completely have to submerse myself in the thought for where he wants to go for a certain episode – to hit it on the level that he wants to present it. Hence, the Death Watch clip that you saw. When you see the whole episode, which I think airs later in the year..

BSR!: That’s always the fun of going to these things. You catch tidbits of stuff you’ll see eight months from now.

JA: But I think what we’re really trying to tell everyone is that we’re not going to the Senate anymore. Let’s say Dee [Bradley Baker] had a lot of work to do this season.

BSR!: Oh, that’s good news.

JA: The last set of episodes that are pivotal. Even later in the season, the work that we have to do – there’s one artist named Woon Chi, who works along with Jesse, and those two guys, along with Ben Radcliffe, who is my right-hand man in Singapore. I feel that with that team, Jesse, Woon Chi, Kathy Chi – all these people that are just like us – they just want to do it, really want to work on it. That’s what season 4 is. Everyone realizing, “This is it. This isn’t a cartoon kids show.” We’re doing stuff in these upcoming episodes that we’ve never done before. I can say with all the passion in my heart that there is nothing on television like what we are doing now. There’s nothing on the scale.

It’s this devotion to actually realizing what you’re working on. Like when Jesse did the shot of Anakin with Vader behind him, he knew he was getting that shot.

BSR!: He told me that there wasn’t anything in the notes for the actual laserblast hitting Alderaan. He just did it. And for the premiere of season three, when they shoot out the guns in the training simulator, he actually went through shot for shot in Return of the Jedi, hand drew all of the electrical sparks from Palpatine’s Force Lightning, and worked all those into the sparks taking out the guns.

JA: Dude, that’s a good story. Dave and I are talking about this: We’d love to put focus on the teams we work with. As much as we’re out here, waving the flag for this show, there’s no way, with how tight the schedule is for the show – there’s no way to work on this show unless you can handle the heat in the kitchen. J esse can handle it, Woon Chi can handle it. You’re going to see in this space battle. Woon Chi is a hard core, hard core Star Wars fan. He gets this one shot that you’re going to see, and all the effects were in there. But one thing we always talk about is all the cool little things we saw in the opening space battle of Revenge of the Sith, so Woon Chi said “Hey, I added these – is it okay if I added these little tiny missles that are blue *ssszzzzzzzooooop!*” Look for that. I was happy with the shot the way the effects were with the lighting because sometimes you have to let it end and say that’s everything we got and I can do everything I can in color correct. The colorist is named Shawn Wells. He and I are in the same mind, because we sculpt the show at the end. That shot came in, and Woon Chi asked if the blue missles were ok – it wasn’t even his job to put them in. He just thought they would be really cool and knew how to do it really quickly. Here’s a guy already stretched to the nines, fourteen, fifteen hours a day, six days a week, and he still goes that extra mile to instead of put what just needs to be in the shot, but add a little how-cool-is-this blue missles.

BSR!: I got a tweet from Jesse a couple weeks ago, “I just finished 19 shots there” some random number so George could see his episode.

JA: Episode 405. I’ll show you a clip of that at my panel. We’ve got designs that Dave is going to show – We’re going to planets, using influence from everything we love – Rome, Cleopatra, The Shining.

BSR!: That’s the way to do things. You have to bring what you know and love into things.

JA: That’s really all I do. I take photographs. If you ask anyone at work, there isn’t a place I go without pictures. I’ve been shooting behind the scenes for everything.

BSR!: I’ve been covering The Clone Wars since Season One, and have never seen you without a camera.

JA: It’s what I do. Because of that, I watch so much of movies that influenced me. Last night, I watched Moon again – we got an episode coming up. Anyway. Everything is an influence for me – Yesterday I got busted in my office for watching Three Kings again. I watch Lawrence of Arabia – George was in last week and he jokingly said “Lawrence of Arabia” and I’m like “Oh my God.” I’ve been watching Lawrence of Arabia, putting it on every night for the last three months, because that movie was obviously an influence for when George did all the desert shots. You needed to feel being in that desert, feel that heat. Everything’s an influence for me. Every lighting shot you see, I’m intimate with. No one has photographic memory, it’s a myth. But you either have that memory or you don’t. I have a memory for almost every single shot of every single episode and I know how every one is lit. I can watch a cut and know that that shot is missing, it’s the wrong take because the lighting is wrong. That Dave has entrusted to me for season three and all of season four and everything in the future. He knows that I think like he does, which is that it is all about the shape and the composition for lighting. It’s all about the pose. If you know the environment, like you can’t light something like an old Western if it’s meant to be in downtown Chicago. Lighting is critical. It’s what we’ve been doing, lately.

BSR!: I read somewhere, or maybe heard at Celebration, that all the bars in the show are the same bar, lit differently. But they’re all so drastically different that I don’t think anyone watching it would go, “That’s the same bar” ever. From the shot of Plo Koon and Ahsoka walking into the disco lights to the bounty hunter guys in one of the Senate episodes, watching dancers, as they’re chasing Padme.

JA: Yeah, but we have some new bars coming up.

BSR!: I don’t mind. I can’t tell.

Joel: I will tell you this. Every time we go to that place in A New Hope that’s a bar, I’m obsessed. I can’t get those angles that you saw in A New Hope that makes you think of the cantina bar. Even though we’re shooting in a set that is supposed to be like the cantina bar, you still want to make it look like the cantina bar. The only way to do that is to make sure the proportions are right and the camera angles are right. That’s why I was looking at this book (Blueprints), and we need to get the blueprints for the cantina, so I can know exactly and then I can do it. Right now, I’m wrestling. The 3D story artists are wrestling.

And that was all the time we had on the record.

Tomorrow we’ll have interviews from Dee Bradley Baker and Dave Filoni. And over the next week we’ll have video interviews from the Clone Wars Season 4 premiere.

Be sure to check back soon!

This week on Anime Update – Manga Edition: Upcoming digital manga releases from Viz Media

Viz Media is bringing us a ton of great digital manga releases in the next few weeks. Get ready to fill up your reading list!

VIZ Media continues to offer manga fans a vast library of newly added digital titles for September through VIZManga.com and the VIZ Manga App for the Apple iPad™, iPhone™ and iPod™ touch. The latest update includes a just-announced manga “speed up” for BLEACH and ONE PIECE that will bring both series up to date with their North American print counterparts by December. (This is especially awesome for new readers because it means you can have a marathon reading session! I personally really enjoy being able to go through large chunks of story at once without having to wait for the next manga to come out.)

Starting Monday, September 12th, and continuing each Monday thereafter, new digital volumes of manga creator Tite Kubo’s supernatural action saga, BLEACH, as well as the high seas pirate adventures of Eiichiro Oda’s ONE PIECE, will be available online on VIZManga.com and also for download on the VIZ Manga App.

The latest manga “speed up” complements a similar accelerated release schedule announced earlier this month for NARUTO, which just saw the release of 7 manga volumes in 7 days on VIZManga.com and the VIZ Manga App, and established digital parity with the bestselling series’ print counterpart.

Other notable September digital manga releases for both platforms will include the concluding volume to Inio Asano’s WHAT A WONDERFUL WORLD!, (September 12th) as well as the final volume to Akira Toriyama’s DRAGON BALL Z (also September 12th). The newest edition of Natsume Ono’s acclaimed samurai drama, HOUSE OF FIVE LEAVES Volume 4, is scheduled for September 19th, a day before the print counterpart’s national release.

Additional new VIZ Media manga volumes launching in the next few weeks include:

September 12th:

BAKUMAN Vol. 6

BLEACH Vol. 23

CLAYMORE Vol. 18

D GRAY-MAN Vol. 19

DRAGON BALL Z Vol. 26 – Final Volume!

FUSHIGI YUGI: GENBU KAIDEN Vol. 6

HYDE & CLOSER Vol. 5

NEON GENESIS EVANGELION Chapter 6

ONE PIECE Vol. 43

OTOMEN Vol. 10

SATURN APARTMENTS Vol. 2

WHAT A WONDERFUL WORLD! Vol. 2 – Series Conclusion!

September 19th:

BLEACH Vol. 24

HOUSE OF FIVE LEAVES Vol. 4 – Debuts a day before the print counterpart!

KEKKAISHI Vol. 13

NATSUME’S BOOK OF FRIENDS Vol. 8

NEON GENESIS EVANGELION Chapter 7

ONE PIECE Vol. 44

ROSARIO + VAMPIRE II Vol. 5

RUROUNI KENSHIN Vol. 22

September 26th:

ARATA: THE LEGEND Vol. 6

BLEACH Vol. 25

CHILDREN OF THE SEA Vol. 4

D. GRAY-MAN Vol. 20

INUYASHA (VIZBIG) Vol. 4 – Exclusive to the VIZ Manga App for iPad

MAOH: JUVENILE REMIX Vol. 6

NEON GENESIS EVANGELION Chapter 8

ONE PIECE Vol. 45

VAMPIRE KNIGHT Vol. 11

For more information about these awesome upcoming releases, visit VIZManga.com or www.VIZ.com/apps.

and since I’ve been watching and reading a lot of Naruto this week, I leave you with this awesome Anime Boston AMV that won Best Editing in 2007: Ganseki no Kobushi. (AMV by Songbird21 of QuickSilver Studios.)

DagoBot is back with more PAXPrime coverage. While there, he got to interview Mega-Ran and K-Murdock:

If you were to make a list of the best team ups from any genre, who would make the cut? Would it be Captain America, Wolverine & Black Widow from ‘Uncanny Xmen’ #268. The Spiderman/Black Cat issues written by indie auteur Kevin Smith. Brainiac & Luthor. The under appreciated Power Man & Iron Fist.

What about when it comes to music. Did the ambitious ‘Watch The Throne’ by Jay-Z & Kanye live up to expectations. Are you old-school and have ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough’ by Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell on repeat. Did the love child of Adult Swim, Danger Mouse and MF DOOM ‘Danger Doom’ rock your world.

In gaming cannon, we have been treated to brawlers that show case characters from popular franchises (Super Smash Brothers, Soul Calibur & Kingdom Hearts) and even crossover clashes of Xmen vs Streetfighter and the ultimate Marvel vs Capcom.

Adding to the pantheon of super powered amalgams of video games, hip-hop, monomyth ethos and overall goodness is Random (A.K.A. Mega-Ran) & K-Murdock. I caught up with the dynamic duo at Pax Prime last month to get their thoughts on mashups, their artistic vision and party rocking out of body experiences.

Hey guys! First off, tell us a little about yourselves.

K-Murdock: My name is K-Murdock… and basically i’m a music producer/audio engineer/self-proclaimed RPG Master/avid watcher of anime/dreamer/and proud fan of the Chicago Bears.

Random: Name’s Raheem, was a teacher for the past 6 years, finally decided to spread my wings and try this music stuff full time. Born in Philadelphia, now residing in the Valley of the Sun.

What first got you each interested in music, and who were some of your favorite acts and musical influences growing up?

R: I had really creative friends. My buddies all created new game ideas, comics, and even music. We all decided one day to try our hands at music, and the rest is history! My first experiences with music were in my mom’s household… she would always have old soul records playing. Being from Philadelphia, arguably one of the birthplaces of soul music, I had a lot of interest in that sound. My mom loved Marvin Gaye, and I have to cite him and Stevie Wonder as two of my biggest inspirations. Once Hip-Hop hit the block though, it was all over…Ha. LL Cool J is my favorite and most influential artist, even to this day.

K: I grew up listening to my lots of 80s R&B as thats what my mom was playing in her car when we would go out. Artists ranging from Anita Baker to Luther Vandross, I know the catalogs too well. That factored with me trying to be as cool as my cousins who got me into hip-hop. I had a nice range of music to influence me, but it all changed once i heard A Tribe Called Quest’ Low End Theory in 91… that was my biggest influence and reason i got into hip-hop and music making.

With each of you having a various influences in hip-hop and rap, what was it like coming together and meshing styles to create your sound?

R: Its a really cool thing, we’re a lot alike in a lot of ways… we both love video games and hip-hop and those were our common grounds. But his sound is something so lush and spacey, that it’s a sound that I’ve always wanted to capture but didn’t know how… I produce as well, occasionally, but have been blessed to have some great minds in my corner.

K: It was pretty natural from my point of view as Ran and I share many of the same influences. It’s always cool when i hear him speak on emcees as his biggest idols the same way I cite producers like Pete Rock or Q-Tip or DJ Spinna. We have so much in common that again, it made it very easy to do music, which is probably why we stay creating together. It’s easy, and when u find that kind of chemistry where its that fun, you dont let it go!

How would you describe your music?

K: Progressive hip-hop, nuff said!

R: I call it “New Retro.” A little old and a little new…Spontaneous. Fun. True. Unpredictable. Witty and inspirational. If you were to put video games, the 80’s, hip-hop, soul music, jazz and stand up comedy into a blender, you’d have something close to The Random Experience.

Tell us about ‘Forever FamiCON’ , how did this come about? What got you guys together for this project?

K: Basically, I was working at XM Radio hosting my radio show Subsoniq and got a package from Ran. In it was ”The Call’ and ”Mega Ran’, both were dope but naturally I had NEVER heard anything like Mega Ran. Coincidentally at that time I was formulating the concept for Forever FamiCOM, which was originally gonna be an instrumental album. After I heard Ran do what he did and make it sound cool and conceptual…I hit him on myspace and the rest is history!

R: It’s a great story, and K told that one perfectly.

What did you think of the reception the album got when it finally dropped? And what was it like gaining a following within the ‘nerdcore’/chip hop/chip tune’ genre

R: The reception totally surpassed my expectations. Seems like I always say that, so maybe I need to start raising my expectations…Ha. To see the love it got from video game publications and sites that I’d been reading for years is just amazing. I’ve had fans tell me that “Dream Master” made them cry. That they knew exactly how I felt on “Drop The Load.” Fans have drawn us amazing art, traveled out to the shows from crazy distances, made videos, remixed the songs…Wow. The fan support has been phenomenal, we were able to tour off of it once, and now we get to do it again. It’s a very amazing and humbling thing.

K: I’m still being integrated into the ‘Nerdcore’ fold. But, from my touring with Ran the last year, I can say undoubtedly that Nerdcore fans support on a level thats beyond humbling…. and a way that makes me resent the lack of support many true hip-hop fans show. Hip-hop is a lot of talk, but the Nerdcore fans put their money and hearts where thier mouths are. It really makes you feel appreciated. I’m happy I am allowed to rep on their behalf. The reaction the album got is a testament. It’s brought out closet nerds who are equally big hip-hop heads as they are gamers like me & Ran… thats been real cool to see. I’m honored to be part of that.

K-Murdock…this one is directed at you.. What ‘equipment’ do you use for your music production?

K: I used to use an Akai MPC 2000xl for like 10 years till a homie who is a beta tester for Native Instruments put me on to the Maschine in 2k9 and now I’m all about that, its the hub of my prod setup, coupled with lots of analog synth VSTs and of course a nice library of records and samples.

How would you describe your musical evolution?

R: The evolution of Random has been a slow and steady one. It’s strange, but when I listen to my old music, I almost don’t even recognize that person anymore. That’s a GREAT thing in my opinion. It’s only been 5 years, and my music has taken me to places I’ve never dreamed of it going. So the sky’s the limit for the future. My mind is in a completely different place when I sit down to make music now…I’m able to draw inspiration from the smallest and strangest things these days. I think I’ve really grown as an artist in ways I’ve never thought I could have.

K: For me, It was meeting Raw Poetic from my group Panacea in 2003. I gave him a beat CD of traditional boom bap tracks but the one beat that I through on at the end of it was the one he loved. It was some experimental sh!t. It became our first recorded song- Birdfeather. RawP encouraged me to experiment and really delve deep into the anime and video game influences. It helps make my music stand out i guess, so I definitely “thank him for lettin me be myself”.

What other projects have each of you worked on or been involved with?

K: Basically I’m known for working with my aforementioned group Panacea, but i also have produced for Grammy nominated artists Raheem Devaughn and done remixes for a wide array of major and indie label artists too. You can peep my discography on my site: http://neosonicprod.com

R: Well, in addition to the “Mega Ran” series of albums, I’ve been working on my Random solo albums and mixtapes. Most recently “TeacherRapperHero” volumes one and two, which are out now and free. In March we released “Black Materia” with producer Lost Perception and my past albums include “The Call,” “Patches and Glue,” & “The 8th Day’. The next two albums in the works are “The Memorandum” with Phoenix rapper Mr. Miranda, and “Language Arts” which will release next year. I’ve worked on this album longer than anything I’ve ever done…it’s gonna be good.

You recently completed a ‘Kickstarter’ funded tour in the UK, tell me a little bit about that? How did it go for you guys?

R: It was an amazing experience! I’m so thankful to be able to say that we not only went to the UK, but KILLED out there! I almost didn’t want to come back. We felt a lot of love and made some lasting friendships out there. Can’t wait to go back and do it even bigger.

K: It was great, for me I’m 3 for 3 on Kickstarter and love what it does. Erasing the middle man between an artist and he or she’s fans. We got some amazing loyal fans and it showed. The fans that werent going to the UK, helped us because they believe so much in what we do musically, very humbling. The trip was great, but I spent too much money as the dollar carries no weight…but the experience was priceless.

What was the first gaming system that each of you owned growing up?

K: Atari 2600, but my fondest memories was when I got my NES in 86.

R: I had an Atari 2600 as well. I was late to move onto NES, so I was the last one on the block still playing Atari while the other kids played Gyromite and Duck Hunt. Ya know what, the last generation of 2600 games were actually really impressive!

What is your present console of choice?

R: I have a PS3 and Xbox 360, but I just got into PS3, so I’ve been catching up on the classics. Playing God of War 3 and Infamous now…waiting patiently for Uncharted 3!

K: PS3 mainly. My 360 has crapped out on me with the RRoD for the 3rd time!

What would be the most ultimate ‘mash up’ of a game?

R: I would love an RPG that contained stealth action techniques, like a Metal Gear Solid…That would be cool.

K: Maybe a Dance Dance meets final fantasy game… not saying I’d wanna play that but it be pretty ridiculous I’m sure.

What game are you currently playing?

K: I’m still playing Fallout New Vegas, I do these character builds based on other game characters and am currently trying to make Marcus Fenux from Gears. Some others that I have done are Agent 47 from Hitman, Dante from DMC, Sheva from RE5. Its fun to me and honestly, I’m just waiting for Deus Ex.

R: Playing God of War 3 and Infamous now.. waiting patiently for Uncharted 3!

If I was someone who has never seen you guys rock live…how would you describe one of your shows?

R: It’s an out of body experience, literally. I don’t know where the energy comes from, but it’s always high octane and loads of fun. I do a ‘freestyle’ at every show, so the song topic and direction changes depending on what I see. It really helps to personalize the experience. Everyone leaves the place sweaty, but there’s no regretful feeling afterwards.

K: It’s energy and lots of crowd participation. As much as the crowd gives us, we give right back. It’s on some Venom symbiotic stuff. Seriously though, the highlight is ALWAYS Ran’s live freestyle hands down.

Not including yourselves, who are your favorite acts to listen to currently?

R: I’m a huge fan of Deftones, I can listen to their stuff all day long. Right now in heavy rotation has been the new Jill Scott album, Kanye West and Jay-Z.

K: I’m a die hard and old school hip-hop head, which sounds old to even say. I usually listen to the same best of Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul CDs I have when I’m not listening to my own stuff for mixing references. I do love the Flaming Lips on a random note.

What can we expect from you guys over the rest of this year, and beyond?

K: New Forever FamiCOM DLC 2, the final one. Before we do our follow-up Sega-themed album in 2k12. A few other secret projects in the works too and lots of shows.

R: More shows, more music…Forever FamiCOM DLC2, which was all fan commissioned tracks. That will be coming soon. Mega Ran 10, the album will hit right after tour and then K and I will get started on the next album for next year. So much stuff!

Is there anything you’d like to promote or plug?

R: Yes, get the new Mega Ran 10 single “Pump It Up” feat. Adam Warrock here! http://megaranmusic.com/track/pump-it-up-feat-adam-warrock also, see ya on the road with MC Chris, MC Lars and Adam.

K: just want to say peace to my homie Random, shouts to all the other artists I work with, and thank you to the fans for helping me live my dream. Any and everything u need to know about me and my music is at: http://flavors.me/Neosonix and again http://neosonicprod.com

Mega Ran & K-Murdock are on tour now! Catch them when they are in your city…
http://megaran.com
Forever Famicon DLC 2 is available now…
http://megarankmurdock.bandcamp.com/releases

Dagobot is Mark Dago, a badass nerd musician in his own right.  You can check him out on Twitter and on Bandcamp.

BAD ISLAND (full-color graphic novel, 220 pages, Graphix/Scholastic, $24.99)
WHO’S RESPONSIBLE? Doug TenNapel (writer/artist).

There are so few givens these days. Especially in the world of comics.

One given, however, is the level of quality of the work of Doug TenNapel. The statuesque California transplant is the creator of the popular cartoon/video game character Earthworm Jim, as well as the writer/artist of nearly a dozen graphic novels varying greatly in style, tone and content.

TenNapel’s latest, full-length work is “Bad Island,” his second graphic novel for Scholastic Books’ Graphix imprint, and his third in full color. (TenNapel re-colored his first comic, the cat-centric “Gear,” when it was re-released by Image Comics in 2007.)

In “Bad Island,” a family of four is shipwrecked on a mysterious land that is fraught with dangers. Plants, animals, rocks … all of them appear to be sentient, and all of them seem to want these castaways dead. Fortunately, our heroes discover some sort of alien artifact that offers them an apparent means of survival. They also appear to have at least one unexpected ally on the island.

THE GOOD.

TenNapel’s thick ink work and exaggerated drawings are lively and cartoonish. His style clearly employs elements seen in classic animated works by Tex Avery, Chuck Jones and others.

But this is not a mere, style-over-substance book. Along with TenNapel, we are fully invested in these characters. There’s hapless, clueless dad, Lyle, his cynical spouse, Karen, their jockish teen son, Reese, and their delusional young daughter, Janie.

The story also has a constant feeling of dread and danger, though there are quite a few laugh-out-loud moments, such as when Janie’s pet snake, Pickles, bites Lyle on the face. (He was planning to give the snake a kiss as a “peace offering.” Maybe you just have to see it to realize just how hilarious this sight gag really is.)

THE BAD.

TenNapel tries to integrate two very divergent story lines here. The transition from the almost Transformers-like opening sequence to the more Swiss Family Robinson-like central story is a little jarring.

And the conclusion is a little abrupt and rushed. Perhaps TenNapel is setting us up for a possible sequel? (It wouldn’t be unwelcome, though there are others of his works that beg for more immediate follow-ups, including both its predecessor, “Ghostopolis,” and “Tommysaurus Rex.”)

THE UGLY.

The initial print run on the $12.99 softcover edition was extremely limited, and it sold out immediately on its release … so like many TenNapel fans who must have his books upon their release, I was forced to buy the $24.99 “library binding” (hardcover) version.

(Much of the blame lies at the feet of comics distributor Diamond Comics, which failed to promote the book’s release, barely informed comics stores as to its existence, and led Graphix/Scholastic to believe that there wasn’t much demand for it.)

This is a minor quibble at best, though.

IN CONCLUSION:

Again, any new work by TenNapel is cause for celebration. Even supposedly “minor” works like “Black Cherry,” “Iron West” and “Power Up” have their share of enjoyable moments. Luckily, “Bad Island” is as good as the aforementioned, winningly spooky horror-fantasy “Ghostopolis” and his recently re-released “Creature Tech.”

By the way, newcomers and longtime fans alike should check out TenNapel’s Website, www.tennapel.com, to check out his musings and updates. He also has a site for a daily strip titled “Ratfist” (www.ratfist.com) and he will be releasing a collection of that silly Batman parody fairly soon as well.

Jerk-Bot is the robotic nom de plume or Utah-based writer/reviewer Jeff Michael Vice. He would like you to listen to him rant about movies and other geeky stuff on both the Geek Show Podcast (www.geekshowpodcast.com) and the Mediocre Show (www.mediocreshow.com), as well as watch him review movies on the Xfinity On-Demand program Big Movie Mouth-Off (www.facebook.com/bigmoviemouthoff).

I waited on this for a while because after a few days of recovering from Dragon*Con 2011 I had to sit back and think what in the world I had just attended. I have never been to a multi-day convention before, in fact I’ve only gone to local conventions like the Salt Lake Tattoo Convention and even then it was because I was getting tattooed.

Dragon*Con became a perfect storm for me and I couldn’t say no. I had a flight voucher, a hotel already set up and it was over a holiday weekend. Dragon*Con was basically telling me I was a bitch if I didn’t attend.

I got in about 11 P.M. on Thursday and within seconds of getting out of the cab I could already feel the nerd vibe. People were hanging out in front of the Hilton in costume and walking inside there was a full X-Men team sitting in the lobby. While I waited for Swank to come grab me and show me the room I started getting my camera gear out because I knew there would be tons of people in costume. After settling in and meeting Scarlett Robotica they took me to the bar, proof that Swank knew I would need booze to survive the weekend.

I was a bit surprised that night, the elevators weren’t packed, there weren’t all that many people around and even in costume the people weren’t really showing any skin, all those things would change by the next night. We found our way to the Marriott and up to the Pulse Bar where I discovered the people dispensing the booze were evil bastards charging $10 for a whiskey and coke. That is just wrong. Especially when Swank knocks your drink over as you’re taking pictures. Even with the outrageous drink prices I ended up hanging out in the loft bar there for a lot of the weekend, it was the perfect spot to watch the people go by. Any shot that seems angled from above in my flickr gallery from the weekend was taken from there. Another reason I hung out there so much is because it was a great place to get the hell away from all the people.

Friday morning I had to hunt down the Media Room to get my badge, my first elevator ride was smooth but I was warned by the other passenger, “The Elevator Game starts today, up to go down, good luck.” That became my mantra and helped me out a lot over the weekend. I made my way over Hyatt (across 2 hotels) without ever setting foot outside and started wandering around looking for the Media Room. After being pointed to the complete wrong hotel by the woman at the Information booth I got my pass and since I had absolutely no idea what to do I headed back to the loft to people watch and take pictures.

I downloaded the Dragon*Con app and perused all the tracks and panels and tried to plan my weekend. I found a problem really quickly, a guy like me is doomed to stand in line forever. The things that struck my interest were going to be the most popular. BSG, Doctor Who, any sort of contest. They would be lined up for hours, and I just wasn’t interested in that. The other problem is so many things I enjoyed were happening at the same time. I missed the Comic Book Babes contest by going to the Georgia Aquarium and ended up missing every other panel because I was just plain exhausted.

Friday we hit the liquor store to try and stop the hemorrhaging of our wallets at the many many hotel bars, and found that to be just as bad. When the price of booze is double that of the Utah state run stores with their 83% mark up, you are an evil greedy tyrant and you can fuck right off. This liquor store was robbed a few days before the con and with price gouging like that I feel no sympathy. However, Yuengling in hand I started hating people a lot less and having more fun, people were flowing into the hotels as the sun went down and there were just so many great costumes.

I really started to have fun Friday night, I had some booze in me (somehow never enough to get drunk)  and every one was just so damn nice. Literally everyone was polite and always up to talk. I think the only guy who was ever much of a jerk was a photographer at the Marvel Meet Up. Everyone else was happy to pose and tell me about their costume and other things they cosplay as. I started feeling out of place in my street clothes.

With so many thousands of people in costumes it was strange to feel out of place but I was glad to be comfortable. The East Coast and I are not friends and I was sweltering the entire weekend. The only time it cooled down is when the rain came in on Sunday, and that signaled doom and late flights for a lot of people, for me it was heaven.

Everyone was off doing their own thing on Saturday and I once again found myself in the Marriott watching people go by and snapping pictures at anything interesting when I noticed a change. A lot of the people streaming by weren’t wearing badges and there was suddenly a shit ton of kids. All the walkways became impassable and just getting past the strollers was a task. There was also a lot of Georgia football fans in the bar. Basically everyone was streaming in to gawk and it ruined the vibe for me. I was exhausted and my hatred for oblivious people with strollers was becoming more than beer could handle so I went to the room to pass out for a while and edit pictures. I ended up passing out for hours and woke up in time to grab a shower and head to the aquarium.

Every year there is a Dragon*Con night at the Georgia Aquarium with discounted tickets and guests,music, special effects, and drinks. I got there a bit early grabbed some food, which sadly was just as shitty and overpriced as the shitty overpriced food at the Peach Tree Center food court next to the Hyatt. They had music playing, some metal and rock that I guess they figured catered to the Dragon*Con crowd and the lights were low and constantly changing color. It wasn’t crowded and that made me happy, it was nice to wander and get some good pictures and to see some people in costume in an interesting environment. They had some bars set up with Star Wars themed drinks that were actually reasonably priced and pretty tasty. I ordered a “Force” because the “Death Star” looked too thick and syrupy. I tried to hold out for the entertainment but by 830 I’d seen everything twice and the speaker were just barely welcoming people and I wanted to get back to the hotels.

Back at the hotels things were heating up, costumes were becoming smaller and I had stopped at a different not ridiculously over priced liquor store and nabbed some booze. I met up with the robots and waited for the “Last Party On Alderaan” which I thought would be a Star Wars themed party and something great from the long line it had drawn. Turned out it was just a dark room with thumping techno. We retreated out to the lobby and kept drinking and this is probably when I got the best pictures and had the most fun. People would just walk around and around the elevator core of the hotel and it was great. I sat back and snapped away.

Sunday was the Marvel Cosplay shoot as well as the Masquerade. I was a lazy ass all morning and edited the massive amount of pictures I had during the day. The rain started just in time for the Marvel shoot so while the clouds made for good lighting it also drained a lot of time. I was back in the room for just enough time to figure out how to get into the Masquerade and set up. Up in the press box I sat back and waited for the Masquerade to start with no idea that it was going to be so long, but it was nice to have a padded seat and a great view. The hosts were hilarious and Aaron Douglas dug himself a deep hole making a drinking game joke with a live audience.

That was my last night and even thinking back with a week behind me it’s still all a blur. I never actually made it to a panel. We tried to go to Liberals In Space and arrived about 3 minutes late. While standing outside trying to figure out what to do we heard yelling and apparently the panel had gotten into a fight and ended it within 5 minutes of it starting. After that we tried to go to a Trivia Contest but it was actually just a SteamPunk author trying to advertise her book. It went from a room completely full to almost empty in about 5 minutes. 

All in all I had a great time and can see why a lot of people love this con and prefer it to some other ones. From my perspective it seems like a con for geeks by geeks whereas San Diego seems to be more about pop culture and whatever movie/series is coming out soon. The fans seemed to be the focus here and even though I didn’t make a panel everyone else I was with did and they were dialed into their fandom. I can’t see any reason I would go back, I had a great time but I had the experience and now I want to move on and check out something different. Every time someone discovered that Dragon*Con was my first come they were a bit shocked and wished me good luck and maybe that is why it was a bit overwhelming for me. Or it could be just that I’m a grumpy bastard who couldn’t keep a solid buzz. Whatever.

All Pictures

There will be another post, chock full of pictures and video, that will cover the actual premiere event. In the meantime, I have the very first review from The Clone Wars – Season 4.

The premiere comprised of two episodes cut together, Water War and Gungan Attack. You’ve all seen the trailers and, as the names imply, we’re treated with two solid episodes of underwater action.

The Quarren and the Mon Calamari are in the middle of their own civil war, with the Republic siding with the Mon Cals and the Separatists siding with the Quarren. The Separatist “Ambassador” is a shark-like Carcadon and is really just a military stooge of Count Dooku’s, hoping to enslave as much of the planet as possible once it’s in Separatist hands.

Fortunately for the Mon Calamari and the Republic, Anakin, Padme, Ahsoka, and Kit Fisto are nearby and able to help.

Gungan Attack takes the battle further when the Republic has been routed and no longer has any remaining clones outfitted for underwater combat. They go to the one place they know where an aquatic race has a standing army ready to deploy: Naboo.

That’s about all you need to know as far as the story goes, what you really need to brace yourselves for is another monumental improvement in images, animation, and quality in the show. These two episodes, projected on a theatre screen, have a breathtaking amount of detail and depth and the colors are so vibrant and well designed it’s preposterous. 95% of these episodes occur underwater and you can feel it in every frame, from debris floating between the subject and the camera to the way the light seems so much more dense. You never, for a second, forget your environment, and everything in the episodes enhances that feeling. I was reminded more than a few times of Jaws, particularly the moments where Matt Hooper is in the shark cage and then trying to hide from the shark on the bottom of the ocean.

As a villain, the Carcadon general was almost terrifying in some instances. His shrieking growl was particularly shiver-inducing, my compliments to the sound crew. There’s an entire sequence that takes place in a swirling vortex of sand and water and it was…well, you’ll have to see it to believe it.

There were so many other impressive touches though, it’s hard to not list them all. One of my favorites was the way the holograms looked underwater. They had more physicality to them, but were also more distorted. It was a great touch.

These episodes might also be the biggest you’ve seen. There were hundreds of characters on screen in the midst of massive battles, explosions everywhere, blaster bolts careening this way and that, vehicles swooping in from that side to this… It was easily the most dense I’ve ever seen this show. The level of detail and carnage in these episodes makes Landing at Point Rain look like child’s play.

As the animation and battle scenes take an evolutionary step forward, so too does the show itself and the stakes raised for all the characters involved. The days where the only casualties were clones or droids were over. Palpatine’s game has spun wildly out of control, manipulating ordinarily peaceful people into joining the conflict. Wrapped up in the web of lies are the Jedi. The Jedi aren’t just killing droids indiscriminately now, the price they pay for keeping the peace includes killing living, breathing beings who are guilty of nothing more than being manipulated by Dooku and Sidious. A lot of work went into making you realize that the Quarren weren’t the bad guys here, and every time a Jedi killed one, there was a cost to it.

People are dying. There are consequences to actions.

This is a huge step for this show, and I’m glad to have the show back.

The season premiere (which airs Friday, September 16 on Cartoon Network) ends on a cliffhanger that will be paid off the next week, but the last shot of Gungan Attack might be one of the strongest images in the entire series. I don’t want to tell you where it ends, but things are bleak. After a battle inside a swirling water vortex, two characters are left talking in their retreat. The only thing more inspiring than the moment is the lighting. As the characters swim away, the lights on them highlight the emotion and fade away, both into the darkness and the end of the episode. It was pretty incredible.

The storytelling on the show has taken another quantum leap forward and I can’t wait to see what they have in store for us for the rest of the season.

I’m not generally one for hyperbole. No matter my misgivings about the Star Wars Special Editions or prequels I don’t think George Lucas raped my childhood. I don’t think I was even minorly diddled. But, in response to Swankmotron’s excellent piece How I learned to stop worrying and love the changes to Star Wars, (nice title homage, btw) I just can’t agree.

After seeing the changes made, especially to Return of the Jedi, something kept gnawing at me from the inside. “This is wrong.” Like Luke nearing the cave on Dagobah, I felt cold. It was if millions of fanboys simultaneously cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. All Labor Day weekend long it worked at me.  And Tuesday morning in a moment of clarity I cancelled my pre-order from Amazon.

Swank is ultimately right. The essence of the films is still going to be in place, and there are a ton of special features that I’m sure are worth watching.  And I realized that insanely, sickly, I was more excited to get retouched prequels that included switching the Yoda puppet for CG, hi-definition podracing and General Grevious and Kit Fisto. . . .and that was weird.  So, what was it that was the final straw?

It was the much-maligned and mocked “Nooooo!” from Vader.

Let me explain. Even as a little kid, I could see flaws in Return of the Jedi. Especially as a teenager, even though I nearly wore those THX-edition tapes out, I knew “Yub Nub” was not cool.  I hated the 26 second cutaway when ONE nameless Ewok dies compared to the tens of thousands of deaths when the Death Star or Executor exploded. BUT, I could always point to that throne room scene. Despite the silliness of teddy bears aiding in overthrowing the Empire on Endor, what took place between Luke, Vader, and the Emperor was the ultimate tale of seduction, a good person almost giving into their baser instincts to exact revenge, and the ultimate redemptive moment. Anakin’s redemption is THE seminal moment of the ENTIRE STAR WARS SERIES.

And just like jazz music, as important as the notes that are being played is the subtext– “listen to the notes he’s not playing” is the aphorism. A monster in a plastic and metal visor and mask emoted more by saying nothing and watching his master torture his son, reach an epiphany that he could no longer be enslaved by the Dark Side, and toss off those shackles in a very literal sense. It’s an emotional journey, made all the more powerful because Vader stays silent. Sometimes silence says more than words do.

Words can’t express the pain, conflict, and resolution that a heroic and monstrous character like the duality of Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader feel as he finally frees himself of his inner demons. Words shouldn’t try to express it. And, barring something so beautiful and profound it could have come from the pen of Keats, Donne, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Milton, Steinbeck, Faulkner, or another master practitioner of the English language, it should not be something as hackneyed and obvious as “No.”

“No” is what my three year old says as he throws a fit. No is a terse, knee-jerk response to something that you don’t want that is relatively inconsequential. “Do you want fries with that?” “No.”

For years, Lucas explained that he was making the changes because the technology didn’t exist when he made the films to achieve his vision. OK. But you certainly had the technology to make Vader say “Noooo!” in Return of the Jedi if you’d wanted to.  Vader didn’t say “No.”  I know because I never heard it when I saw Jedi in theaters as a kid, I didn’t hear it on my VHS as a kid, I didn’t even hear it on the DVDs that came out a few years ago. And yes, I know you’re trying to tie it to the “Noooo!” moment in Revenge of the Sith– but that script was written, that film was almost done being made when you released those DVDs. You sure could edit in Hayden Christensen, but the world wasn’t ready for the “Noo!!!” yet?

Which leads to the conclusion that the “No!!!” was not necessary, did not really tie in to the prequel trilogy, and was the effect of either some sort of serial derangement on the part of George Lucas to compulsively change his work, or an intentional middle finger to fans who reacted badly to the “Noooo!” in Episode III.

Let’s take it back to jazz for a moment. Listen to the notes he’s not playing. Now imagine if someone “remastered” Miles Davis’ Birth of the Cool and right an a pivotal musical climax they added in a note break where they started playing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.”  Imagine if someone took Dave Brubeck’s Take Five and decided that 5/4 time is too unaccessible for audiences, so we’re going to record the song in 4/4 so people can dance to it. Travesty. You ruin the heart and soul of the artistic expression.

Making Vader say “No!” is a similar betrayal. Because you know, as much as people could rip on Ewoks, you could always point to that complete badassery of Vader’s redemption- his rebirth, if you will. Because if Anakin dies and became Darth Vader from a certain point of view, so too did Vader die and come back to life as the man who tenderly told Luke, “Tell your sister you were right about me.”

You know what else this is like?  The Doobie Brothers.  The Doobie Brothers were one of the best bands of the 1970s, hands down. Jesus is Just Alright, China Grove, Black water– all good songs. They went through lineup changes, sure. But their essence was that of a great rock band. Then Michael Macdonald joined the Doobies as their lead singer. And they went from the southern-fried rock of China Grove to the craptastic-immediately-ready-for-elevator-music What a Fool Believes and It Keeps You Running.

That is what Lucas has done. In a futile attempt to gild a lily, he has ruined the essence of what it was.

And granted, he can do it. As he likes to lord over us desperate throngs, they are his movies. They are from his universe that he created from his imagination. (Or borrowed from Kurosawa’s Secret Fortress and Joseph Campbell’s Hero of 1000 Faces, but let’s not mince around here)

But like the alcoholic who is destroying his own furniture, who yells at you, “This is my stuff- I can do with it what I want!”  Yes, yes you can, George. You can do what you want. But I do not have to sit here and watch this emotional and creative death spiral, wondering half the time whether you’re doing this because you’re sick and need help, or because you’re intentionally trying to dick over your fanbase. That’s one of the ways that alcoholics commit violence against those around them. And I won’t stand to be part of your psychodrama any more.

Ultimately, I hope it serves as a warning. An intervention of sorts. George- we love you, we love Star Wars, but it hurts us to see you do this to yourself and your legacy. You need help, and we want you to get it.

I don’t think my single act of protest is really going to affect Lucas. I wish it would. The Blu-rays will sell like hotcakes, as they deserve to.

But my limit has been crossed. I’ll buy the Blu-rays when they are released with the forms of A New Hope, Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi as they existed without all of the additions.  In the meantime I’ll watch the original version on DVD. . . . except for Empire, whose Special Edition was perfect and the pinnacle of what Lucas should aim to do when reworking his masterpieces.

This is not a call for a revolt. This is not a call for a boycott. This is the story of one fan’s decision to try to “trust your feelings” and “let go”.

###

Oh, and another thing why I’m not buying it. Lucas has still not fixed the damn rotoscoping on Ben Kenobi’s lightsaber in A New Hope when he fights Vader on the Death Star. And the new krayt dragon sound is lame. The original one was fine and could just be left alone.