Tim's Toons: Star Wars - the Animated Misadventures

Tim here. A good cinephile would be able to look around the world and think about the whole range of possible movies in all their splendid variety. Me, I haven't been able to stop thinking about Star Wars ever since the new Episode VII trailer dropped yesterday. That's the poisonous fever bog of nostalgia for you.

So, as long as I'm not going to get my head right anyway, how about we take a little wander through the corridors of Star Wars and animation? Because, golly, talk about being gripped by a dubious affection for a brand name...

At some point, people subjected themselves to all of these things just to get a little tiny bit more of a Star Wars fix. And even if The Force Awakens can't live up to the awesome pileup of top-shelf fanservice in that trailer, there's not any chance in hell that it can be as bad as some of these:

The Star Wars Holiday Special (1979)
Two and a half years after the original film redefined what blockbuster box office could look like, the very first expansion of the universe came in the form of this legendarily wretched variety show that starts with ten damn minutes of people in terrible shaggy suits barking at each other in unsubtitled Wookiee-ese. After which it proceeds to get worse. The solitary highlight, and that's almost solely because of the lowlights surrounding it on all sides, is a short animated sequence by Nelvana in which Luke, Han Solo, and Chewbacca fall for the most transparent con job in the universe and future fan-favorite Boba Fett is introduced. He rides a dinosaur. [More...]

The animation style is kind of fun in that "there was so much coke in the '70s" way, with supposedly rigid metal objects flexing and bending like some sort of organic cartoon hell, and sweeping, exaggerated lines. Look at it purely as a work of fluid draftsmanship, there's something undeniably arresting about it, though it's never any less than ugly. This is the animation team's honest interpretation of what Harrison Ford looks like, for example:

The morbidly curious can find it on YouTube, though divorced from the ghastly special surrounding it, it just seems like a dumb curio and not the druggy nightmare it truly is. At any rate, its "success" directly paved the way for Nelvana's...

Droids (1985-'86) and Ewoks (1985-'87)
Hey, so you think you hate the Ewoks? You don't hate the Ewoks.

Now you can hate the Ewoks.

With a grand total of 39 episodes between them, the one-season Droids and the two-season Ewoks were part of the push to fully embrace Star Wars's new identity as a marketing machine for children that happened to involve some movies, or something. They are significant almost solely in that they exist: unlike the Holiday Special, the two series are marked mostly by being profoundly mediocre, not viscerally awful. They're the exact same sci-fi/adventure junk food that littered '80s kids' television so thickly, tarted up with the trappings of a franchise that was just coming down from its very highest peak. For once, sanity prevailed.

Star Wars: Clone Wars (2003-2005)
The one unambiguous good of the trilogy of prequel movies was this 25-part "microseries" bridging Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith and covering all the material that would have made the first half of the latter movie even slightly comprehensible. The Flash-style shorts were the work of Genndy Tartakovsky, riding high on his brash TV series Dexter's Laboratory and Samurai Jack, and not yet being booted from studio projects for no good reason.

Clone Wars isn't up to that level – marketing concerns and corporate interference certainly make their presence felt – but it's distinctive and so quickly paced that tearing through episodes is like devouring a bag of potato chips before you know what you've done. Though it's on the manic side, it's the best Star Wars-related property we've had in the last three decades, give or take some of the better video games. And of course, it was subsequently overwritten.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008-'14) and Star Wars: Rebels (2014-present)
Kicking off with an utterly toxic theatrical movie, the second Clone Wars series is rather more generic and child-safe, though more expansive in its storytelling; if Clone Wars 1 was designed to whet its audience's appetite for Revenge of the Sith, Clone Wars 2 transparently wanted to atone for some of that film's sins, and deepening the characters beyond the flat writing and performances that had failed to enliven them in the theatrical releases.

It was cut off a bit short in order to accommodate a brand new series covering the time period between the prequel and original trilogies, and here my knowledge ends: the design and animation of Rebels was sufficiently bland-looking to me that I never bothered even watching a clip. But hey, the Disney corporate folks obviously thought it was good for extending their brand dominance, doesn't that sound appealing?

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