# By Chris Baker Email Author
# August 15, 2008 |
# 2:38 pm |
# Categories: Movies, sci-fi
The release of The Clone Wars movie has sent some hard-core Star Wars fans into a tizzy.
"Yeah, it’s Star Wars," wrote JackBauer24 in a post about the animated Clone Wars on The Galactic Senate website. "Star Wars from a man who cares little about established continuity. It’s Star Wars that takes place in a time period already over-crouded (sic) with conflicting stories and source materials. I understand that Lucas wanted to continue the story into television, but Jesus Christ, couldn’t he have picked a point in the saga that wasn’t filled with stories, some of which HE HIMSELF approved?!"
The flap among the fanboys isn’t so much because of the quality of the movie, which opened Friday to mixed reviews, but because of the role it plays in the overarching Star Wars continuity. In fact, the keepers of Lucasfilm’s well-manicured franchise had to come up with a new level of reality for Clone Wars to inhabit — just the kind of move that can get Star Wars superfans’ Wookiee suits in a twist.
"The Clone Wars takes place chronologically between Star Wars films Episode II and Episode III," says Henry Gilroy, a seasoned scripter of animated film and TV who wrote the film as well as the CG TV series due later this year. "We follow the adventures of Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi as well as other Jedi fighting to preserve the lofty ideals of the Republic against Count Dooku and his cronies who are threatening to tear the galaxy apart."
The new CG Clone Wars also takes place between a couple different levels of canonicity. As every hard-core Star Wars fan knows, there are differing levels of reality in the franchise’s continuity. The novels, videogames and comic books are all part of what is called the Expanded Universe.
Many Lucasfilm employees spend their days making sure that the different pieces of this vast merchandising empire all fit together and are based on the same physical reality, whether it’s the color of lightsabers or the distance from one planet to another.
But there’s another, higher level of canon — the canon of the films — which is often called "G Canon," since George Lucas himself is intimately involved in it.
"Even though it was animated in a stylized CG form, George made it very clear to director Dave Filoni and myself that the animated movie was continuing the story of the live-action movies," says Gilroy.
The events in the CG Clone Wars fall somewhere in between the Expanded Universe and the G Canon of the films. And it’s up to people like Leland Chee, an employee of Lucas Licensing, to educate the many different artists working in the Star Wars universe about what has come before.
"He’s like the king continuity geek," says Gilroy. "He’s an encyclopedia of Star Wars
knowledge combining all the hundreds of comics, dozens of novels and games too. There is just so much in the Expanded Universe (everything not in the movies), it was great knowing Leland was there to prevent any grave inconsistencies from coming to pass."
Chee also had to determine how the events that play out in the CG Clone Wars
film and upcoming TV shows would coexist with the rest of the Star Wars world. The action didn’t quite fit with the films, and didn’t quite fit into the Expanded Universe.
Finally, Chee had to create another, intermediary level of canonicity:
T Canon.
Since Chee announced this new level of reality in the Star Wars universe, some fans have been disgruntled. The blog at the Canon Wars site, which tracks the doctrinal disputes of the Star Wars universe, has a fun post on the hue and cry.
According to Gilroy, the Clone Wars CG offerings will give us a fresh perspective on the characters from the prequel films. "Take
Anakin Skywalker, for example," he says. "We’re going to see another side to him in the movie — when he was a champion of the
Republic and a great Jedi hero. So he’s not the brooding, petulant kid we knew from the movies, but the best friend and comrade-in-arms of
Obi-Wan Kenobi, as well as a playful big brother-like mentor to his new padawan, Ahsoka Tano."
Lucas weighed in on the new additions to his story line. And even though the Clone Wars
CG offerings exist on their own level of reality — below the films but above the books, comics and videogames — Lucasfilm continuity geeks like Chee nit-picked inconsistencies.
"Once I wanted to use the Toydarians, a race of aliens from the movies, in a comic book story, and Leland told me it wouldn’t make sense — so I swapped them out for a new alien civilization," Gilroy says. "A guy like that is indispensable in a galaxy that has grown as large as it has."
UPDATE: Leland Chee posts in the comments below, noting that his job also entails helping to repair rifts in the space/time continuum of Star Wars. (Look for additional coverage of him and the Lucas Licensing department on wired.com next week.) Chee writes:
- Luckily in my role in Lucas Licensing, not only do I have the opportunity to nit-pick, but I also have the opportunity to work with our authors to explain the inconsistencies to make everything cohesive.
We did this with Boba Fett’s backstory (much of it was attributed to
Jango). We did this with the stormtroopers being clones (not all stormtroopers are clones explaining the height differences of stormtroopers and the degredation of their markmenship). We did this with the very early EU deaths of Jan Dodonna (captured) and Hobbie
Klivian (crashes alot). And rest assured, we’re already working it all out with The Clone Wars animated series.
- Luckily in my role in Lucas Licensing, not only do I have the opportunity to nit-pick, but I also have the opportunity to work with our authors to explain the inconsistencies to make everything cohesive.
