When you're lazily copying Coruscant Nights, why hold back?
Star Wars Rebels Season One (spoilers)
- Thread starter ALF
- Start date
When you're lazily copying Coruscant Nights, why hold back?
Yeah Sabine's costume may not make a whole lot of sense... but I still love the design. It's a bit girlier obviously, but still really cool I think.
And while the artist angle doesn't bother me as much as it does other fans, it does seem slightly extraneous and unnecessary, and I wouldn't be surprised if Kinberg and Filoni eventually drop the idea.
And while the artist angle doesn't bother me as much as it does other fans, it does seem slightly extraneous and unnecessary, and I wouldn't be surprised if Kinberg and Filoni eventually drop the idea.
I liked the movie, but wasn't as impressed as I hoped I would be. I can see this getting much better as the story progresses. I already really liked Hera and Kanan from having read A New Dawn, so the standout character in the movie for me was Zeb. Him impersonating a Wookie was hilarious. Something Star Wars comic fans will love is the Devaronian with a Russian accent. I hope annoying Ezra will grown on me as he grows up just like Ahsoka did in the Clone Wars.
Lots of potential, we will just have to wait for it to come out over time.
Lots of potential, we will just have to wait for it to come out over time.
While we're all waiting for the new show, they've gone and released the unfinished story reel versions of four of the episodes they were working on when the show was canned.
It's all rough animatics but it's full voiced, scored and reasonably watchable if you manage you expectations. There's a few good character moments in there, including a bit of business about Ahsoka's departure and some very heavy foreshadowing for the OT in general and ANH in particular.
It's all rough animatics but it's full voiced, scored and reasonably watchable if you manage you expectations. There's a few good character moments in there, including a bit of business about Ahsoka's departure and some very heavy foreshadowing for the OT in general and ANH in particular.
Impressions from the first (two) episode(s):
The Good
-The pacing was spot on, none of the 45 minutes were wasted. I was caught up in the story pretty easily. Lothal is an interesting place, hopefully more stories in the future will bring details. Lots of action and combat. The leads are all pretty ballsy so it's good to know they will be going lots of attacks against the Empire. I like the ship the Ghost... still can't figure out if the TIEs are any different. I thought the wings were shorter than the OT but I can't tell.
-This time period is exciting, too. I thought for sure it would open with some Empire propaganda, newsreel style. But then, maybe I was fixed on how The Clone Wars always started (newsreel style commentary over clips to get you up to speed) and I have to stop comparing this show to TCW in order to enjoy it.
-Not sure how I feel about the new blaster fire - more like the films, yes, but those red streaks somehow feel out of place next to TCW's refined look.
The Bad
-In a word, Ezra. I don't like that kid. He's annoying not quite as much as young Anakin but enough. I guess these Star Wars heroes always have this kind of character in order for the story to 'work.' I'm sure it's likely he'll grow on me but Aladdin in space with a slingshot is kind of irritating. "Gotta keep one jump ahead of the breadline. One swing ahead of the sword..." Maybe it doesn't matter but he is the main character so I'm guessing we won't see many stories without him.
-The character animation is sometimes off. As others have noted, the Wookies didn't look great and I agree. I said earlier that the animation looked great in the shorts but after Spark of Rebellion I watched some other The Clone Wars episodes and it wasn't in any way unclear that TCW had higher production quality than Disney, which is really too bad. Some of Ezra's reactions looked terrible. His eyebrows especially during close ups looked like something out of Reboot.
- We don't really get much of an impression of what life is like on Lothal and what the undesired effects of imperial occupation are - besides menacing fruit vendors. I'd read somewhere that it was a farming world much like Tatooine and in The Other Rim also like Tatooine. But I want to see more of the workings of how life is affected on these planets controlled by the Empire. I'm sure we will get there. But any kind of backstory or description of Lothal in the beginning would have helped.
-Why does Kanan's lightsaber have to connect together? To avoid detection and go unnoticed as a Jedi? And the inquisitor's saber-thing is going to spin? Just stop it. Silly gimmicks are cheap. Just give the heroes/villains a normal goddamn lightsaber, please. People are not gonna lose interest in characters unless they are wielding a machine gun that shoots lightsabrers.
-Ahh! We finally get to see Kessel but not the actual spice mines? Will there be energy spiders? Damn... but I would hope that future stories will lead us back to Kessel for a proper look at these horrific spice mines. Spending the entire time "there" but just outside the mine was a major let down for me, although I acknowledge fully that the story didn't require it.
-Not really a 'bad' but TCW was often very fresh in its approach to using different lead characters. Sometimes only Anakin, sometimes only Obi-Wan, sometimes only Ahsoka or Yoda or some clones. Sometimes the focus was on the baddies. And that was something really great, where you could have a story about the Nightsisters or Maul or whatever and disregard the heroes completely. Can these even happen in this show?
The Awesome
-Sabine and Zeb. Those two are spot on. There were two especially great moments that gave me a really sound impression of what they would be like. When Sabine's explosives went off on the ship inside the Star Destroyer's hangar and she expressed her frustration at being unable to see the resulting explosion - pure genius!
Zeb chuckled to himself after pounding a couple of troopers in the head and then admits to his friends that he loves the feeling of his fists on their "bucket" heads. That was another mark of brilliance in this series where these freedom fighters take a lot of joy in what they're doing. Very fresh, inviting and satisfying. These two are going to be fascinating characters.
-Also distinctive for the baddies - Visago, the crime lord(?) was a character full of potential as well as Callus, who despite his rather uncreative name was really making his screen time count. When he arrives on Kessel to apprehend the "Rebel cell" and orders the troops to move out it was chilling. It's going to be such fun watching the Empire in all of these stories.
-The format - standalones! I have gotten a bit tired of the multi-arc format of TCW in the end. Sometimes it's just nice to have one-off stories... if the concept is bad then you are stuck with it for the next couple of weeks.
-Space battles! There were lots of encounters with TIEs and explosions and such.
Come on, Oct 13, I need moar Rebels now!
The Good
-The pacing was spot on, none of the 45 minutes were wasted. I was caught up in the story pretty easily. Lothal is an interesting place, hopefully more stories in the future will bring details. Lots of action and combat. The leads are all pretty ballsy so it's good to know they will be going lots of attacks against the Empire. I like the ship the Ghost... still can't figure out if the TIEs are any different. I thought the wings were shorter than the OT but I can't tell.
-This time period is exciting, too. I thought for sure it would open with some Empire propaganda, newsreel style. But then, maybe I was fixed on how The Clone Wars always started (newsreel style commentary over clips to get you up to speed) and I have to stop comparing this show to TCW in order to enjoy it.
-Not sure how I feel about the new blaster fire - more like the films, yes, but those red streaks somehow feel out of place next to TCW's refined look.
The Bad
-In a word, Ezra. I don't like that kid. He's annoying not quite as much as young Anakin but enough. I guess these Star Wars heroes always have this kind of character in order for the story to 'work.' I'm sure it's likely he'll grow on me but Aladdin in space with a slingshot is kind of irritating. "Gotta keep one jump ahead of the breadline. One swing ahead of the sword..." Maybe it doesn't matter but he is the main character so I'm guessing we won't see many stories without him.
-The character animation is sometimes off. As others have noted, the Wookies didn't look great and I agree. I said earlier that the animation looked great in the shorts but after Spark of Rebellion I watched some other The Clone Wars episodes and it wasn't in any way unclear that TCW had higher production quality than Disney, which is really too bad. Some of Ezra's reactions looked terrible. His eyebrows especially during close ups looked like something out of Reboot.
- We don't really get much of an impression of what life is like on Lothal and what the undesired effects of imperial occupation are - besides menacing fruit vendors. I'd read somewhere that it was a farming world much like Tatooine and in The Other Rim also like Tatooine. But I want to see more of the workings of how life is affected on these planets controlled by the Empire. I'm sure we will get there. But any kind of backstory or description of Lothal in the beginning would have helped.
-Why does Kanan's lightsaber have to connect together? To avoid detection and go unnoticed as a Jedi? And the inquisitor's saber-thing is going to spin? Just stop it. Silly gimmicks are cheap. Just give the heroes/villains a normal goddamn lightsaber, please. People are not gonna lose interest in characters unless they are wielding a machine gun that shoots lightsabrers.
-Ahh! We finally get to see Kessel but not the actual spice mines? Will there be energy spiders? Damn... but I would hope that future stories will lead us back to Kessel for a proper look at these horrific spice mines. Spending the entire time "there" but just outside the mine was a major let down for me, although I acknowledge fully that the story didn't require it.
-Not really a 'bad' but TCW was often very fresh in its approach to using different lead characters. Sometimes only Anakin, sometimes only Obi-Wan, sometimes only Ahsoka or Yoda or some clones. Sometimes the focus was on the baddies. And that was something really great, where you could have a story about the Nightsisters or Maul or whatever and disregard the heroes completely. Can these even happen in this show?
The Awesome
-Sabine and Zeb. Those two are spot on. There were two especially great moments that gave me a really sound impression of what they would be like. When Sabine's explosives went off on the ship inside the Star Destroyer's hangar and she expressed her frustration at being unable to see the resulting explosion - pure genius!
Zeb chuckled to himself after pounding a couple of troopers in the head and then admits to his friends that he loves the feeling of his fists on their "bucket" heads. That was another mark of brilliance in this series where these freedom fighters take a lot of joy in what they're doing. Very fresh, inviting and satisfying. These two are going to be fascinating characters.
-Also distinctive for the baddies - Visago, the crime lord(?) was a character full of potential as well as Callus, who despite his rather uncreative name was really making his screen time count. When he arrives on Kessel to apprehend the "Rebel cell" and orders the troops to move out it was chilling. It's going to be such fun watching the Empire in all of these stories.
-The format - standalones! I have gotten a bit tired of the multi-arc format of TCW in the end. Sometimes it's just nice to have one-off stories... if the concept is bad then you are stuck with it for the next couple of weeks.
-Space battles! There were lots of encounters with TIEs and explosions and such.
Come on, Oct 13, I need moar Rebels now!
Last edited:
Well it was OK, but given the pedigree I honestly expected better. The writing felt heavy handed, almost clumsy and so far the characters are all fairly one-note. Mostly I think it was trying a little too hard to be light and fun while also attempting to be epic and clever. Call it a clash of tones for lack of a better term. Not off to a bad start, but I just hope it improves.
Last edited:
Its Star Wars the name alone means a decent sized audience will watch.
Well.. not blown away to be honest.
As Reverend pointed out the characters seem pretty one dimensional but it's also just the pilot so things may improve.
May watch a few episodes to give it a shot but i don't like the art style much and if there's one more "we'll just fly into the hangar bay of a Star Destroyer and park there like were the pizza delivery guy" level of dumb writing i'm out.
Also.. extremely bad move to expose yourself as a Jedi but then that's what the drama will be about i guess.
As Reverend pointed out the characters seem pretty one dimensional but it's also just the pilot so things may improve.
May watch a few episodes to give it a shot but i don't like the art style much and if there's one more "we'll just fly into the hangar bay of a Star Destroyer and park there like were the pizza delivery guy" level of dumb writing i'm out.
Also.. extremely bad move to expose yourself as a Jedi but then that's what the drama will be about i guess.
I thought it was good although the best Star Wars animated show of the week belongs to the unfinished Clone Wars Utapau serial they put up recently.
Not a bad introduction for the scene and some humorous moments, especially Zeb imitating a Wookiee. The design of Lothal was really impressive at times. Great cameo by Obi-Wan as we see the Obi-Wan and Yoda's infiltration of the Jedi Temple in ROTS pay off. We got to see Kessel, which was very cool. The Wookiees as slave labor goes back to old Star Wars backstory. Kanan revealing himself to be a Jedi was an awesome moment and the last five minutes with that had shots of the crew with Obi-Wan's voiceover was a terrific moment. Agent Kallis was a fun villain (and I did laugh when he kicked the stormtrooper off the support beam) and we got an all-too brief of Jason Isaacs Inquisitor. He should bring the character to life in an awesome way.
Downsides...the awesome clonetroopers are now stormtroopers which means them not being able to hit anything. It won't be easy trying to keep them as a threat. Way too much use of just about everything in the original trilogy from score to sound effects to various callbacks. Listening to Freddie Prinze Jr. woodenly talk about the Force the way Obi-Wan did in the original trilogy was both unoriginal and groan-inducing. They just went overboard at times. Despite being an hour, this "movie" felt rushed. The four-minute commercial breaks by the Disney Channel sure as hell didn't help.
It's not the Clone Wars but it is worth watching. Thankfully this show has one great executive producer in Dave Filoni. And Simon Kinberg.
Not a bad introduction for the scene and some humorous moments, especially Zeb imitating a Wookiee. The design of Lothal was really impressive at times. Great cameo by Obi-Wan as we see the Obi-Wan and Yoda's infiltration of the Jedi Temple in ROTS pay off. We got to see Kessel, which was very cool. The Wookiees as slave labor goes back to old Star Wars backstory. Kanan revealing himself to be a Jedi was an awesome moment and the last five minutes with that had shots of the crew with Obi-Wan's voiceover was a terrific moment. Agent Kallis was a fun villain (and I did laugh when he kicked the stormtrooper off the support beam) and we got an all-too brief of Jason Isaacs Inquisitor. He should bring the character to life in an awesome way.
Downsides...the awesome clonetroopers are now stormtroopers which means them not being able to hit anything. It won't be easy trying to keep them as a threat. Way too much use of just about everything in the original trilogy from score to sound effects to various callbacks. Listening to Freddie Prinze Jr. woodenly talk about the Force the way Obi-Wan did in the original trilogy was both unoriginal and groan-inducing. They just went overboard at times. Despite being an hour, this "movie" felt rushed. The four-minute commercial breaks by the Disney Channel sure as hell didn't help.
It's not the Clone Wars but it is worth watching. Thankfully this show has one great executive producer in Dave Filoni. And Simon Kinberg.
Maybe for once he wanted to leave a show before it was pulled out from under him?
Okay, this had some merits and some potential. The story was okay, although I still find it odd that they're focusing on such peripheral characters when it would be so much more interesting to follow characters like Bail Organa and Leia, Vader and Tarkin.
There were some parts of the design work I liked, such as the propaganda posters and grafitti in the town on Lothal (?). But a lot of the time, I found myself thinking, "This would look so much better in 2D animation." The textures on the characters are way too smooth and plastic, which is especially problematical for anything involving hair. I could hardly watch Ezra because of those rubbery blue pseudopods on his head that writhed around with minds of their own, looking more like some kind of alien starfish parasite feeding on his brain than anything resembling hair. Just a really, really bad character design, at least for 3D. (And why was Obi-Wan so babyfaced?)
I wasn't crazy about the overly mobile and bouncy character animation either. It was kind of jarring in the scene where Kanan explained the Force to Ezra -- Prinze's voice was this solemn monotone, but Kanan was animated as moving around in a very lively fashion that clashed with it completely. The animation on the free-fall sequence in the corridor was reasonably good, though -- although they made the perennial mistake of showing people "swimming" through air, which doesn't work since air is a lot less dense than water. The most they could do is rotate around their centers of mass, not really propel themselves forward significantly.
I also didn't think much of the music, which apparently is still by Kevin Kiner. I often wished he'd use more of Williams's themes in The Clone Wars, but this is a "be careful what you wish for" situation, because now he's doing nothing but variations and pastiches on Williams motifs, and it feels very derivative and lazy. And it's often off-putting when a familiar theme is used for the wrong thing, like when Obi-Wan's leitmotif was heard in the dogfight sequence or when "Leia's Theme" from ANH was used for the Wookiee family's reunion. Not to mention that cue I've heard in one or two of the previews/shorts that's a pastiche of the basket chase music from Raiders of the Lost Ark, which isn't even in the right universe! It's way, way too imitative and unoriginal. I wouldn't mind hearing familiar themes used when they're appropriate, like Obi-Wan's theme for his Holocron message or the Imperial March for the Empire or Vader (although I still find it odd when that motif is used in anything set before TESB), but there should be more original themes for original characters and situations.
So I'm interested enough to keep watching, but there's a lot about the execution that I don't like.
I liked it. Thought it was fun. It had that mix of action and humor that the original trilogy had, IMO.
Similar threads
