Star Wars: a story for every fan? (Andor Spoilers)

[Heartofice]

1 minute ago, IFR said:

That's probably true, and I suppose those who enjoy it have literally earned it if they've managed to put themselved through the very low points of the first season.

Personally, I can't do it. There are so many shows and books that have that same strong ending, while also having a strong beginning and a strong middle, that I prefer to focus on those types of stories.

The next show I plan to watch is Peaky Blinders, which I understand is very good throughout. I am also going to watch Gravity Falls, and then the Alec Guiness adaptation of the Smiley series of books by Le Carre (and those books are consistently great).

For books, I'll be reading Garth Nix's Sabriel, then I'm going to read some Gene Wolf books. I also would like to get into Guy Gavriel Kay, so I'll be reading Tigana and the Fionavar Tapestry trilogy. I loved Jack Vance's Dying Earth collection, so I intend to read his Lyonesse series.

And it goes on and on. Just based on what I've read of all of these works, I'm fairly sure I will thoroughly enjoy them from beginning to end. And there's many, many more on the list. There's so much entertainment out there the list is nearly inexhaustible. And it continues to build.

So for me, if a work is deeply flawed in such a way that you literally have to suffer for dozens of hours in order to finally start enjoying it, it seems crazy to go with that option when you have immediately available so many works where you only are provided with entertainment, no suffering.

Honestly I think there is A LOT of skippable stuff in Clone Wars. Like I said I'm almost at the end of season 5 and I can say honestly it might have been worth watching 3-4 full episodes up to this point. I have skipped a lot as instructed and I don't think I've missed very much. You get the broad strokes of certain backstories and none of them are very complicated or all that interesting. I will say there does seem to be a big jump in quality at around this point, the animation is certainly better and it's less stupid.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

100+ episodes most of which are “meh”… yeah… I’m not investing in that…

[karaddin]

I watched it while recovering from surgery and very out of it under heavy pain killer sedation so lots of hours of accessible light entertainment was a feature rather than a bug lol. That gave me the foot in the door to appreciate the rest

[Argonath Diver]

I love me some Star Wars, but I am too focused on the visual vs the plot. Even the Bad Batch was just so damn ugly that I couldn't enjoy it. I am very jealous of you lot that got a thrill out of the Clone Wars final seasons. 

No matter how compelling those best episodes are, I just can't get past my totally subjective opinion that the animation style completely throws me off. It's nails on a chalkboard for my eyes.

I absolutely love the vibe of Arcane, the Marvel What If? and several of the SW:Visions shorts. I'd pretty much watch any Star Wars related content animated like those forever. 

[Heartofice]

3 hours ago, Argonath Diver said:

I love me some Star Wars, but I am too focused on the visual vs the plot. Even the Bad Batch was just so damn ugly that I couldn't enjoy it. I am very jealous of you lot that got a thrill out of the Clone Wars final seasons. 

No matter how compelling those best episodes are, I just can't get past my totally subjective opinion that the animation style completely throws me off. It's nails on a chalkboard for my eyes.

I absolutely love the vibe of Arcane, the Marvel What If? and several of the SW:Visions shorts. I'd pretty much watch any Star Wars related content animated like those forever. 

The visuals of clone wars are dreadful, it’s one of the ugliest things I’ve ever seen. There does seem to a be a point where they upgrade but they never seem to work out how to make people run! 
 

I find it all the more galling that so little praise and attention is given to the Tartakovsky Clone Wars show, which is in his style and is quite beautiful, and that it was discarded and replaced by a modern day Thunderbirds. It feels like such a Lucas decision.

[Derfel Cadarn]

What’s weird is that at the start they seem to regerd the earlier series as canon; Asajj Ventras is there and has her red lightsabers, Anakin is a knight and has his scar…

 

[Werthead]

What is amusing is that Lucas was apparently so impressed by the first couple of episodes that he decreed they be edited into a feature film so it could go head-to-head in the cinema with Pixar features. Just...no, George.

[Toth]

I must admit, when I was a kid, I can remember sneaking down to the living room past midnight during summer break to watch "Starship Troopers Chronicles", a very early completely CGI show that existed for a very brief time because someone was high enough to think that making a kids' show to a Paul Verhoeven movie and then make it actually somewhat closer to the Heinlein books was a good idea. It was dumb cheesy fun, but also extremely impressive for its time (we are talking about 1999 here).

So when I was a teenager, Clone Wars was my guilty pleasure because it somehow struck a similar chord of stringing together animated action set-pieces and so I, sporadically, whenever I stumbled across it on TV, stuck to watch a couple of episodes here and there and despite not having seen all of it by a long shot, it was enough knowledge to go into the last comparably mature seasons straight away years later. It seems I slipped through the cracks with that journey and avoided having to binge through most of the early crap. I guess Starship Troopers made me strangely predisposed to the style of the show in a way that I managed to shrug off most of the silliness (though I do distinctly remember that I was always upset that the strongest arcs shied away from exploring really dark or ambiguous topics whenever they started approaching them, as if someone in the writing room always notably went "Oh shit, yes, this is supposed to be a kids show, let's backpedal a little here... and always found that to be quite a shame).

[Werthead]

On 12/22/2022 at 6:04 PM, Toth said:

I must admit, when I was a kid, I can remember sneaking down to the living room past midnight during summer break to watch "Starship Troopers Chronicles", a very early completely CGI show that existed for a very brief time because someone was high enough to think that making a kids' show to a Paul Verhoeven movie and then make it actually somewhat closer to the Heinlein books was a good idea. It was dumb cheesy fun, but also extremely impressive for its time (we are talking about 1999 here)

The CG was done by Foundation Imaging after they lost the Babylon 5 CG gig due to various dubious insider trading and fraud, so it was good to see them pick up that project.

Clone Wars's animation improves immensely over its run, it's really startling how primitive and weak the first season, maybe even the first two seasons, feel now. They had very limited assets to use and they were also kind of figuring out the pipeline of how to use CG on a week-by-week basis in a more timely and less complex fashion than earlier CG series had done (as well as Starship Troopers, there were Transformers: Beast Wars and ReBoot even earlier on). They were held back until they'd built up the assets library enough to sustain the type of stuff they want to do, and also had the wherewithal to update those models and textures. Season 5 and 6 are almost a different show, and of course Season 7 and The Bad Batch (which really is almost just Clone Wars Seasons 8 and 9) look phenomenally better.

Although apparently Disney mandated a simpler animation style for Rebels which really screwed them over, because their assets from five-and-a-half seasons of Clone Wars was not initially compatible and they had to convert the stuff they wanted to re-use. Fortunately the change in time setting meant there wasn't a lot of stuff they did want to reuse, but it was still a pain in the backside (and of course they did the same thing again for Resistance).

[Toth]

12 hours ago, Werthead said:

The CG was done by Foundation Imaging after they lost the Babylon 5 CG gig due to various dubious insider trading and fraud, so it was good to see them pick up that project.

Even in Starship Troopers you saw the animation evolve drastically from arc to arc. I still remember vividly how in the Pluto arc bullets were copy-pasted flat pixels flying across the screen that had no impact whatsoever, when in the later arcs Bugs got riddled with wounds and on top of that had much more complex movements and gestures. Also of course the background. Pluto and Tophet were just very basic stone and sand deserts, but later they would visit water and jungle worlds and of course fight through cities on Earth when the war became more grim.

I remember that Beast Wars show was in the timeslot directly after Starship Troopers and in comparison it looked horrendous.

Looking at their history, it's interesting that they also did Star Trek Voyager and Enterprise and members went on to do Battlestar Galactica. The world sure is a small place.

[Aemon Stark]

Ignoring all the larger debate about the merits of this and that trilogy or series... I just finished Andor. 

It's just so great. I don't really care about how things fit tonally with other movies or series, but this is the first "adult" Star Wars I've seen since Rogue One. The original trilogy have their tonal issues but will stand the test of time. 

Andor is so confidently executed and produced. And it's uniformly well acted and the production design is sumptuous and exhilaratingly immersive. The finale's funeral scene - and the inevitable riot to follow - was beautiful. I think this is my favourite show of 2022, maybe longer, which is saying something. 

Just need to convince my wife to watch now so I can do a rewatch... perhaps tomorrow. 

[Corvinus85]

 

 

[DMC]

4 hours ago, Aemon Stark said:

Just need to convince my wife to watch now so I can do a rewatch... perhaps tomorrow. 

It's so rewatchable.  I'm planning a second rewatch within this month when my brother and I take care of our niece.  She's 14 months, so unfortunately she won't be able to fully understand its greatness.

[Heartofice]

So I finished Clone Wars. I mentioned before, Andor motivated me to go back and fill in the blanks of the SW universe, something I had completely fallen out of love with for decades, to see if there was anything there that would give me a new appreciation of material I hated, like the prequels. I know a lot of people said great things about Clone Wars, especially the ending and so I wanted to try and get there to experience it for myself. 

The first thing to say is that I didn't watch it all, I used a list of essential episodes to guide me. 
https://geneticjen.medium.com/clone-wars-episode-guide-db0740df1234

It handily mentioned whether even in this list things were skippable or even not very good so I knew when I could cut even more stuff out.

Was it worth it?
The answer to that is.. sort of?
I don't know how much I enjoyed any of it, even at it's absolute best the show is only 'pretty good', and at it's worst it's a total catastrophe. I might not be the audience, but I'm scared of who the audience for this even is. Don't get me wrong, there are some good episodes in there, and I respect some of what it achieved, but it really did feel like a grind at times. It didn't pass the 'am I looking at my phone' test very often. 

I don't think I would recommend the show to anyone, maybe some teenage boys who really like wooshy wooshy lightsabre battles, but if you are like me, an older grizzled ex star wars fan, then I don't think this really does it.

How much does it improve The Prequels / SW Universe
It does add context and depth to the events in Revenge of the Sith, the Clone Wars and Order 66. The problem is that the interesting bits of depth really only happen right towards the end of later seasons. If this is what you are after then you can basically skip at least 5-6 seasons.

It also doesn't really add much depth to other characters, especially Anakin. I was hoping the jarring conversion into Vader you see in Sith would be gradually shown, but it's really not there in any detail. You see a bit more of Obi Wan and Yoda and I guess learn more about them, but in general the characterisation on the show is flat and uninspired. They don't really do much with existing characters to really give you more than you would get from the movies. 

The final episodes which are a huge step up in quality on almost every level are maybe the only real ones that seem to tie closely into the movies, and they really do make Sith a better movie, if only by a bit. 

My problem however is that I kind of hate almost every single design decision Lucas made for the prequels. Yes there is a good 'back of the napkin' story outline in there which is what I think some fans fixate on, but almost everything introduced in the prequels and expanded on in this show irritates me. I hate the huge stupid droid battles, the superhero mega jedi silliness, I hate most of the alien worlds they introduced, the dumb baddies, I hate the way the Jedi council is represented. The show is bogged down by all this, it makes the whole universe seem childish.

I also hate that 50% of the SW universe is now Boba Fett in some form or another, whether it's clone troopers or having to see entire planets of Mando people wearing his outfits.. all because he was a cool looking toy. Ugh

How much can you skip?
So if your motivation is the same as mine: Get context for the rest of the SW and understand all the easter eggs in stuff like Mandalorian and Andor, and enjoy the famous last few episodes, then I don't think there is very much you need to see. You could technically go in cold for the finale and you wouldn't miss too much. I'd recommend watching the Darth Maul arc episodes and some of the Order 66 implant stuff, but other than that it's probably just a waste of your time, unless you.. you know, enjoy the show.

Overall I think the finale was quite good, it had an epic, cinematic quality that was really missing throughout, as if someone just let Filoni off the leash and let him do whatever he wanted. It's when Lucas feels involved that the show takes a turn for the worse. Its a bit of a shame the whole thing wasn't more like that.

I was even thinking I might go and watch Rebels, but i've lost all motivation now. 
 

[DaveSumm]

I suspect the list of essential Rebels episodes would be much smaller. It’s basically a self contained show with the same cast each week, then some Clone Wars people drop by, and then how the ending leaves a few people. A YouTube primer, the Darth Maul stuff just to cap off that thread, and the last few. 

Maybe I’m forgetting a bunch of stuff but I don’t recall it being that relevant. I assumed it was gonna be kinda what Andor is going for, the genesis of the rebellion. But it’s more like a tiny cell, who then stumble on the rebellion basically as you see it in ANH.

ETA: actually there’s some Darksabre stuff as well I’m forgetting. Can’t remember how many episodes that takes up.

[RumHam]

Rebels is a lot more consistently watchable than The Clone Wars. The only real misstep is introducing the concept of the inquisitors using their lightsabers like helicopters to fly around. I dunno what that was. 

[Maltaran]

The episode in season 1 with R2D2 and C3PO is pretty forgettable 

[Isis]

On 1/2/2023 at 9:38 AM, Maltaran said:

The episode in season 1 with R2D2 and C3PO is pretty forgettable 

I thought that was a fantastic comedic break.

[Lord Varys]

On 1/1/2023 at 11:20 PM, RumHam said:

Rebels is a lot more consistently watchable than The Clone Wars. The only real misstep is introducing the concept of the inquisitors using their lightsabers like helicopters to fly around. I dunno what that was. 

I agree with that. The only problem with Rebels, I think, is that it gets too rushed in the end ... and the sudden disappearance of the Inquisitorius at the end of season 2 is also kind of strange. While it is great to have Thrawn as a villain, they should have also continued the Force villains angle. Also, of course, it was kind of silly to posthumously promote 'The Inquisitor' from season 1 to 'the Grand Inquisitor'. Would have been better if the guy had just been a Inquisitor, with higher ranking Inquisitors showing up after his demise.

[Jaxom 1974]

Bad Batch back today. First two episodes. And that's okay.