Dave Filoni sat down with Sci Fi Wire (well, it was really a conference call) to talk The Clone Wars animated series which debut's October 3rd on Cartoon Network. See the excerpt below and click here for the full interview:
"The Clone Wars movie elicited a lot of debate over how well it did or didn't do. Was it for kids or adults? What are your thoughts on all the debate, and in what ways does the film set up the series?
Filoni: I found it really interesting. As a fan of Star Wars for so long, I always knew there was going to be debate, you know? No matter what you do with Star Wars, you're going to have a huge debate about it, which is actually part of the fun of being a fan, having the big arguments over "I liked this" or "I didn't like that," or "This aspect fit with what I thought, but that aspect didn't." I think that one of the greatest things is that people are still talking about Star Wars, you know? "Anakin has a padawan; I've never heard of that." But now everybody is talking about the fact that Anakin has a padawan, and the movie introduced that idea. And it didn't just introduce ideas about who these new characters are, but it introduced this whole other look for Star Wars, which I think probably was always going to take people by surprise, because it's CG. So it has the ability to be somewhat like live action when you look at the vehicles, but then the characters are obviously not. So it's kind of a new frontier for the Star Wars universe, though they'd dabbled in cartoons before, as far back as Droids and the Christmas special and more recently with the previous Cartoon Network shorts with Genndy [Tartakovsky, who directed a 2-D animated Clone Wars series of interstitials]. But it's never been this large a format, necessarily, and George is so very involved with this that it was going to be a whole new experience for Star Wars fans.
And I think now they've got a taste of that experience, and they're starting to see the trailers running on Cartoon Network for the series, and they're starting to figure out, "Oh, I see what this is about." It's kind of exciting. My take on it is that it's a really exciting time to be a Star Wars fan, when we thought after Revenge of the Sith there might not be that much more Star Wars, and now with The Force Unleashed [video game just] launched, the talk is all Star Wars and the impending Clone Wars series as well. So it's a good time to be a fan."