By the time Star Wars Eclipse is playing on your game console, it will have been a decade since the premiere of the brilliant looking game that wasn’t, Star Wars 1313, previewed here at borg. We never learned why the realistic virtual reality-filled game wasn’t released, but since then we’ve seen Star Wars: The Old Republic, Star Wars Battlefront, and more, and just last year it was Star Wars: Squadrons. Before we see any actual game play, Lucasfilm Games has released what they’re calling a “cinematic trailer” for the next step in Star Wars gaming: Star Wars Eclipse. Familiar characters include C-3PO, Yoda, Nute Gunray, and a Mon Calamari dressed in Jedi robes, but some game sequences revealed have characters that look straight out of Avatar.
The downside? That’s tens of thousands of hours of effort for a game about the Star Wars prequel era. You’ve got to ask: Are people really still interested in that era? With shows like the animated The Bad Batch and the live-action Obi-Wan Kenobi, clearly Disney thinks the answer is “yes.”
He already established himself going lightspeed as a guy named Han in the Fast & Furious movie series. He’s Sung Kang, an actor from Georgia who brings an extra dose of cool to every TV or movie project he’s a part of. Thanks to Disney and Lucasfilm, he’s now going to be a part of the Star Wars universe. He and a host of other actors were announced this week as Disney revealed the key cast of the six-part event series Obi-Wan Kenobi, which begins filming soon. Ewan McGregor has been tied to the project for years, finally to reprise his role from the Star Wars prequels as an older Jedi Master. Joining him from the prequels is Hayden Christensen as Anakin or Darth Vader, along with Joel Edgerton as Luke Skywalker’s Uncle Owen Lars and Bonnie Piesse as Aunt Beru. The real question the cast announcement raises in light of last year’s appearance of a de-aged Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker in The Mandalorian is: How could Lucasfilm not give Hamill an appearance in this series, too? Sure, he’d be a kid whining about spare parts at Tosche Station, but why not?
The last time genre fans had a news release as big as this week’s Marvel and Star Wars news was from Disney about the ten Phase IV Marvel projects announced at San Diego Comic-Con 2019. In addition to yesterday’s Marvel news, Disney previewed eleven major Star Warsprojects in the pipeline. Not a surprise so much as a wish fulfilled for millions of Star Wars fans is a spin-off live-action TV series called Ahsoka, featuring the return of Rosario Dawson as the Force- and lightsaber-wielding Ahsoka Tano. An actor returns on the franchise, a preview for a series that started filming last month, Disney reveals the title of the next Star Wars movie, plus news on new movies for Willowand Indiana Jones. And Lucasfilm CEO Kathleen Kennedy had more surprises.
It’s easy to argue that the very best part of George Lucas’s Star Wars prequels was Darth Maul. All of his scenes in The Phantom Menace and especially his “Duel of the Fates” with Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi were spectacular, a cut above the rest of the three films, thanks in no small part to the physical prowess (and facial expressions) of actor Ray Park. The lightsaber scene is still unsurpassed as the best Jedi-Sith duel of all eleven Star Wars films. Yet, as we learned for the third time this past December, just because someone knocks you down a vast Imperial chasm, it doesn’t mean you’re actually dead (we should have learned this lesson from Luke in The Empire Strikes Back). The animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars resurrected Maul, first as a rebuilt man with robotic legs in season four (an amnesiac found on a “junkyard” planet like where Rey is later seen), then upgraded with more human-like cyborg legs. Maul will return in a new 12-episode seventh season, voiced again by Sam Witwer, where he will have a rematch with The Clone Wars heroine Ahsoka Tano, former Padawan of Anakin Skywalker. Maul will again be portrayed by Ray Park, this time using motion capture for the animation.
Somebody at Disney must know we love Darth Maul (we’re thinking The Clone Wars original director Dave Filoni, back again for this final season) because of Maul’s return in Solo: A Star Wars Story, revealed in the film’s climax as the ultimate villain behind the curtain. Was Emilia Clarke’s Qi-ra intended to be Maul’s Sith student? Was she about to be? Will we ever find out? Oddly enough, we didn’t/couldn’t learn the answer because the film Solo was made toward the end of Star Wars Rebels, which ended its run years after the events in Solo, although it takes place before the events in Solo. What we do know is Darth Maul is still around for Star Wars Rebels, where he tricks the young series lead Ezra into being his student, and ultimately Daul dies at the hands of… Obi-Wan Kenobi, who is hiding Luke on Tatooine, something that could also be addressed in the forthcoming, yet-to-be-titled Obi-Wan Kenobi live-action series. Confused yet? This ordering might help:
The Phantom Menace
Attack of the Clones
The Clone Wars
Revenge of the Sith
Solo: A Star Wars Story
Star Wars Rebels
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
Star Wars/A New Hope
The Empire Strikes Back
Return of the Jedi
The Mandalorian
The Force Awakens
The Last Jedi
The Rise of Skywalker
Understanding The Clone Wars’ other fan-favorite character, Ahsoka Tano, voiced again by Ashley Eckstein, pretty much requires another viewing of both The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels to get fully caught up. Originally she was destined to die at the hands of her Jedi Master, Anakin aka Vader, but then in Star Wars Rebels there was some time travel and parallel world business that prevented her death, plus the return of Emperor Palpatine… even before The Rise of Skywalker. Tano is considered by many fans to be one of the strongest heroines of the Star Wars saga (along with Leia Organa, Jyn Erso and Rey), appearing in a number of novels and comics outside the TV series. Her spirit voice can be heard in the battle between Rey and Palpatine in The Rise of Skywalker, where fans learned she must have died off-screen sometime before the events in that film.
First disclosed at San Diego Comic-Con last summer, Disney/Lucasfilm is bringing 12 new episodes of The Clone Wars to pay streaming channel Disney+ beginning next month. The series appears to follow the older, original series animation style versus the updated, more realistic characters and environments of Star Wars Rebels. Here’s the first trailer for the series, followed by an earlier preview:
