Just to clarify, being a fan of a franchise doesn’t mean that one has to abstain from saying anything negative about the franchise, as plenty of Star Wars fans, die hards and casuals, have gone on to offer plenty of raw and unchecked line of criticism at the movies, the shows, and pretty much anything they can get their hands on. When it comes to talking about The Clone Wars though, the 2003 animated series does kind of open itself up to a lot of discussion and possible criticisms since it was a bit crazy and it did feature characters that we didn’t really get to see anywhere else. A wolfman Jedi? How awesome would that have been to develop and even push in the toy aisle? And Durge, the bounty hunter that was basically a walking nerve cluster and should have been one of the most noted characters in the franchise during the Clone Wars, was made into a footnote that really didn’t do much other than take on the Jedi, kill a bunch of people, and talk tough before being tossed into a star by Anakin Skywalker. In a big way this series really butchered the Clone Wars, which all came from the second movie of the prequel to be fair and spanned for several years as it’s already been established. But the whole continuity of the Clone Wars is definitely in flux, especially given that it was in a way a kind of off the cuff mention during A New Hope. It’s definitely something that George Lucas might have intended to say more about but somehow didn’t really think through entirely before trying to link the prequels with the original trilogy.
Another confusing bit about the series that the clip goes into are the battle tactics that are displayed, or the lack thereof since quite honestly going straight at your enemy with guns blazing is something we’ve seen done in The Patriot with Mel Gibson, and it’s kind of a ridiculous way to conduct a war since it’s accepting that there are going to be mass losses while not bothering to try and minimize that number instead so as to weaken the enemy but not your own forces. What’s interesting about the Clone Wars is that if one reads the graphic novels or even the actual books that were written of this period the fighting that went on didn’t always deal with such sad and sorry tactics, but included a great deal of guerrilla warfare that saw the clones and their Jedi generals taking on the Separatists in many different skirmishes that weren’t so neat and ordered. Plus there was a lot of talk about the morality of creating clones just to use them as meat machines to send into the grinder that was the endless supply of Separatist droids. In fact some stories made a careful note of this when trying to get the reader to care about the clones in a big way. There were even episodes that primarily featured the clones so as to show their side of the war and how they felt about it. Two books I’d happily recommend are from the Republic Commando series, Hard Contact and True Colors. The books detail a small contingent of clones that were slated to be executed as they were seen by the Kaminoans to be faulty, but were saved by one of two Mandalorians that were brought in to train the soldiers, before Jango’s time, it’s hard to recall at the moment. But they were raised to embrace the Mandalorian ways and culture, only to eventually be replaced by those clones that would come later.
There have been moral conundrums that have emanated from the Star Wars franchise, and episode I was certainly ridiculed mercilessly when it came to Jar Jar Binks. Bu somehow those same people that saw Jar Jar and the Gungans as racist caricatures went quiet when the Clone Wars came out, despite the fact that the ramifications of growing human beings in a lab just so they could go off and protect a Republic that barely saw them as anything but tools of war should have had red flags waving in the breeze. It’s funny to watch how hypocrisy works sometimes, especially when fans show it so blatantly. All in all though this version of the Clone Wars was somewhat sketchy if only because the animation was kind of odd in its own way and because it didn’t really rate as high as the CGI version or the actual movie. Ben Lindbergh of The Ringer had something to say in his own words. As much as people wanted to dump on the live action movie and several other aspects of the Clone Wars, this cartoon was likely one of the worst aspects of it, and considering it wasn’t absolutely terrible that’s not too bad really.
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