Clone Wars Volume 1
Sol and I have just finished watching season 1 of Clone Wars which we had to borrow as two separate DVDs from the video shop (and they wonder whey people pirate stuff). I wasn’t expecting much from this, not being a fan of the three prequel movies but I was pleasantly surprised by this cartoon series.
I put the DVD on for Sol so I could do some other stuff and then found myself wandering into the room and standing in front of the TV and getting hooked by the episodes.
Clone Wars is very much pitched at children and has a kind of nostalgic voice-over intro in sixties-newsreader style that sets up each episode. The writing is actually pretty good though. To me, good writing is all about setting up believable relationships between the characters and keeping the right pace of story progression. I really hate stories that are over-complicated and rely on characters who you thought were good guys suddenly revealing they are secretly bad guys.
So the things that annoyed me about the prequels were the way Qui Gon and Kenobi and later Anikin and Kenobi were just so cool all the time. Cracking jokes in the middle of being shot at just doesn’t do it for me and wrecks any sense of peril. As for the plots of those films, I could never figure out what the hell the bad guys were actually trying to do. It was a big complicated plot to destabilise the republic and take control but it just was too hard to follow on first viewing.
Anyway, the Clone Wars which is set between the second and third prequel does a good job of keeping the stories simple whilst working within the framework of Dooku being a bad guy who is trying to get planets to leave the republic and sign up to his separatist movement while the jedis and clones are engaging the separatists in war and trying also to win back planets that have defected to the separatists.
The series introduces some new characters who we see briefly in the third film being assassinated in another stupid plot twist where apparently clones can be given a secret order to slay all jedi. There is Anikin’s apprentice Ahsoka Tano and Dooku’s apprentice Asajj Ventress. Also a few other jedi masters who join in such as Plo Koon and Luminara Unduli.
And of course there are the old favorites, R2-D2, C3PO, Padme and (not so favorite) Jar Jar Binks.
The stories also focus on some of the clones and interestingly touch the surface of some philosophical questions about identity and the sanctity of all life. This is touched on in an early episode where Yoda and three clones must fight their way out of an ambush. The clones question why Yoda refuses to leave a wounded clone and Yoda points out that each of them has a slightly different personality and preferences and each of them perceives their own unique identity. The clones are used to being treated as dispensable resources.
The episodes tend to focus on values such as team work, use of power / ethics, thinking for yourself, loyalty (even to droids!), self sacrifice for a greater cause and friendship.
The action scenes are actually fun to watch even though it is a cartoon. Sure there is the usual million-lasers-that-miss-the-good-guys stuff but some of the light sabre duals are quite fun with the use of the force and the quips and sledging thrown in but also the space battles and clone trooper action is well done.
There is some good humour in the episodes too. I particularly laughed at the one where Jar Jar Binks pretends to be a jedi. He is much less annoying than in the movies but still a buffoon.
I definitely recommend this series for kids because the values are there without the puke-making moral lectures at the ends of the episodes and they are quite watchable for adults too.
