The Clone Wars TV show is amazing.

It took a little while to find its feet, I admit, but once it did (and often even before it did), incredible! But that’s hardly a new take, everyone knows and says that it’s great… because it is. I can’t emphasise that point enough! There’s also an added degree of nostalgia in my case – I grew up watching it – but again, that’s hardly unusual. I think Star Wars is the franchise that most defines the feeling of nostalgia for people. Clone Wars is really good, is the point (just in case I hadn’t managed to communicate that) and it demonstrated, expertly, the full potential of the prequel era. (Also the “The” is important to distinguish it from the also amazing 2003 Clone Wars cartoon)

For all that, the knowledge that there are loads of unmade Clone Wars arcs, that were written and often recorded, haunts me. That might be a little dramatic, it doesn’t keep me up at night or anything. I just really wish they had been made. I don’t know many of the behind-the-scenes details, but when Disney bought Star Wars they threw George Lucas’ story treatments in the bin (Grumble, Grumble, Grumble) and then unceremoniously cancelled The Clone Wars. And it was unceremonious; Lucasfilm was halfway through production on season 6. The bit of season 6 that they managed to finish making was eventually released on Netflix and fortunately included the important story arcs (the episode where Arc Trooper Fives discovers the clone inhibitor chip). The episodes that were only partially finished (fully recorded with unfinished stand-in animation/animatics) were later released on the Star Wars website and included two entire arcs and a bunch of other bits and pieces. And for a while, that was it. Just bits and pieces that would come out and/or be referenced in the following years. Dave Filoni – The Clone Wars showrunner – would pick up a lot of abandoned threads and characters in the proceeding Rebels show. And it was stated, on occasion, that the unaired/unmade arcs were still considered canon. Some would even be adapted into comics and books like Dark Disciples. But still, there were a lot of unseen Clone Wars stories.

Then season 7 was announced.

Season 7 was made, I assume, to encourage Disney Plus subscriptions. But I can’t put into words how excited I was the day they announced it. Yet even after season 7 was out and Clone Wars was finally “finished” it wasn’t really. Before the Disney sale, Lucasfilm had planned on doing 8 seasons and one of the writers revealed on Twitter (back when it was still Twitter), that all of it had been written. With an average of twenty episodes per season and an average of four episodes per arc, that’s around ten unseen Star Wars stories! Plus, the two or three season 6 arcs that weren’t made. And the long-delayed season 7, only included three of them: an updated and completed Bad Batch arc (which serves as a backdoor pilot for their show and was one of the unfinished animatics released on the Star Wars website – it’s quite interesting to compare them), an arc about Ashoka’s exile from the Jedi order and – most excitingly – the long prophesied and excellent Siege of Mandalore that they had been building up to for years and then never got to do. But that still leaves eight unmade Clone Wars arcs! That one of the new arcs was a previously released animatic saddens me, especially since they didn’t also finish Crystal Crisis on Utapau – the other fully released animatic. Still, the best thing about this commercially unviable streaming service boom (only Netflix is profitable) is that a lot of shows that were cancelled before their time got a chance to shine again – though in some cases it’s been a situation of “careful what you wish for” and I’m mostly just happy that the Siege of Mandalore got made.

Now though, a lot of the unfinished Clone Wars stories seem to be working their way into other projects – at least that I’ve noticed. As I’ve said, some story details from the unaired arcs have been revealed over the years, and now I keep seeing them in other projects. And that’s awesome! They remain canon and we still get to see them, albeit in an altered form. For instance, there had been a planned Boba Fett bounty hunter arc, which would have seen a fully armoured Boba killing Cad Bane in a duel – this was released in animatic form. A couple of different versions of this have since been made. The first was in Bad Batch when Cad Bane makes an unexpected cameo – having been hired by the Kaminoans to capture Omega – and a duel ensues between himself and Hunter. To me, it seemed very reminiscent of his originally planned demise. This was accompanied by his somewhat confusing appearance at the end of the Book of Boba Fett, in which Boba Kills him in a one-on-one fight (confusing in the sense, first, that it begs the question “What has Cad Bane been doing for the last 30 years? Was he just chilling under the empire?” and second because people who hadn’t seen Clone Wars would be left scratching their heads and saying, “who’s this blue guy and how does he know Boba so well?” I think the scene would have worked better if live-action Cad Bane had been introduced in episode 1 or 2 and then made sporadic appearances throughout the show, but I digress). Then there’s the Clone Wars Kashyyyk arc, which would have seen the Bad Batch involved in the initial Separatist and Trandoshan invasion of the Wookie home world – the infamous droid attack on the Wookies, what about it? This was heavily referenced in an episode from the Bad Batch show (makes sense), that saw the Batch return to Kashyyyk after the formation of the Empire and their enslavement of the Wookies (what about the Stormtrooper attack on the Wookies, anyone?). The Bad Batch show is the obvious place to adapt and incorporate unproduced Clone Wars stories – the first episode even has a Clone Wars opening – and it has the Clone Wars animation style which is another plus.

And now we have “Tales of the Jedi” which also utilises the Clone Wars art style and has already been used to tell more Clone Wars era stories. One of the unproduced Clone Wars arcs would have been an Ahsoka origin story in which a Zygerrian Slaver, masquerading as a Jedi, would try to kidnap an infant Ahsoka. She would have then been saved by the far-less Jedi seeming Plo Koon (allowing the Jedi to be kidnappers instead!) Excitingly, Tales of the Jedi episode 1 seems to have begun telling this story. There was no appearance of Plo Koon or the Zygerrian slaver – it was about Ahsoka’s parents learning that she was force-sensitive. But that is the obvious starting point for such a story, and I’m holding out hope that future seasons of Tales of the Jedi will tell the rest of that arc. And I think there’s quite a good chance of that – it’s Dave Filoni who writes it. (Since writing this post, they’ve announced “Tales of the Empire” which will finally conclude the Clone Wars era story of Barriss Offee).

Yet, despite all that, a lot of Clone Wars remain completely unseen (seriously why didn’t they at least finish making Crystal Crisis on Utapau? There’s probably a reason but I still hope they do it). There are loads of potentially great arcs that they haven’t made any attempt to adapt. And for some it’s understandable. I think it’s unlikely that they’ll ever do the planned Yuuzahn Vong alien abduction arc since the Yuuzahn Vong have been de-canonised along with the rest of the Expanded universe/Legends (they were invaders from another universe). But there are other unmade but revealed arcs like “Top Gun with Clones” which, if anything like the clone-centric Umbara arc, would be fantastic and for which there’s no inherent reason why they couldn’t make them. Especially since Disney Plus is determined to churn out an endless plethora of Star Wars content. Personally, I’m holding out for a string of animated movies that adapt the remaining arcs (and maybe some non-canon films depicting the old EU as well) but who knows? I doubt they’d leave these stories on the table, so we’ll just have to see.

-Dexter