4 Things to Expect from The Clone Wars TV Show (and 3 Things Not To)
by Tom Burns

3. Count Dooku and General Grievous: Behind the Evil

Even though they both met their ends in Revenge of the Sith, there are two things you can't deny about Count Dooku and General Grievous - they're both pretty bad-ass and we know next-to-nothing about them. (Well, if you haven't read the various novel/comic book tie-ins to the Clone Wars... or if you're not a hardcore Hyperspace-subscribing Star Wars fanboy... or if you don't run your own Star Wars wiki... you probably don't know much about them.) Lucas just teased us with little nuggets of cool about the Count and the General in Clones and Sith and The Clone Wars series seems like the likely place to finally pay off those teases. In the official trailer for the series, Dooku is featured heavily, and the Clone Wars website has posted a cool new piece of concept art of the good General. Expect this devious duo to be the "Big Bad" of the Clone Wars series, filling in the unknown portions of their evil doomed lives and leaving Palpatine to pull the puppet-strings in the shadows.

4. There Will Be Blood

Did you think that there was a lot of death in the PG-13 Revenge of the Sith? (We're still pretty shook up by the whole Youngling slaughter.) Well, prepare for more of the same in The Clone Wars. Not only is this a war-time TV show - more in the style of Band of Brothers than Hogan's Heroes - but the producers seem committed to making this a much more adult animated show that TV is used to seeing. And we're talking in terms of content and character development rather than sex or dick jokes. According to the online site Wookiepedia, Lucas was quoted on the May 1, 2007 episode of Late Night with Conan O'Brien as saying, "It's very much Star Wars. It's not a, you know, South Park comedy. It's not a kiddie's Spongebob Squarepants. It's sort of the first dramatic animated show that is, um, PG-13, so it doesn't really go on late night, it doesn't go on Saturday afternoon, it actually doesn't go anywhere."

Lucasfilm's head of fan relations Steve Sansweet has described the look of the show as "a melding of Asian anime with unique 3-D animation styling," which - as any of you who familiar anime know - means that you should be expecting an INSANE level of action. From what we've seem from the series' trailer, it looks like the show will be a mixture of staggering believable wartime battles - where clone troopers are reaching into a pile of goo that used to be their clone brother's face - and over-the-top, hyper-kinetic Jedi-on-Jedi action. Not everyone is going to make it out of The Clone Wars alive (we're looking at you, Ahsoka), and those that do will never be the same again (looking at you, Anakin).

3 THINGS NOT TO EXPECT FROM THE CLONE WARS SERIES:

1. The conception of Luke and Leia

C'mon! You KNOW it happens during this time frame. Why can't we get a little glimpse into Anakin and Padme's wedded bliss? Are we such prudes? And, besides, you know that R2 probably secretly filmed the whole thing. That little tin can is such a closeted-pervert.

2. The re-election campaign of Jar-Jar Binks

Jar-Jar, fandom's favorite whipping boy, popped up as a senator in Attack of the Clones, and it was thanks to his dim-witted suggestibility that Palpatine was able to become Supreme Chancellor of the Republic. It might have seemed like a good idea at the time, but as the Clone Wars dragged on, you just know that the investigative staff at the Naboo Tribune must have pieced together Jar-Jar's role in the seemingly endless war. Lucas could use this story to parallel the current war in Iraq (oh, timeliness!) and smack Jar-Jar around a little more for our pleasure. That's win-win.

3. The cost-benefit analysis of The Death Star

Revenge of the Sith ends with the beginning of construction of The Death Star, but the initial planning phases - design, budgeting, accounting - must have taken place during the Clone Wars. Show us Palpatine pitching the project to his executive board, the Sith accountants trying to make the numbers work, the Emperor reviewing carpet samples and paint swatches with his interior designers... it'd be like The Office meets Trading Spaces, but with Star Wars! Doesn't that sound awesome? Doesn't it? Hello? Where did everyone go?