Planning on Re-Watching "Star Wars: The Clone Wars"

With last year's announcement that Star Wars: The Clone Wars would be coming to an end, the first thing that entered my mind was disbelief, then I was upset!  I really enjoyed the show!  At first, I kept trying to compare it to the original Star Wars: Clone Wars series and, just like the 2008 Clone Wars movie, I realized I would have to adjust my expectations.  It didn't take long for me to recalibrate my expectations and I enjoyed it.  

Not only did I enjoy it, I came to see it as being a really great show in its own right. I realized in my defending the prequel trilogy that it's a great set-up to watch Star Wars: The Clone Wars and that it's tremendously enjoyable on its own. Someone has already written on 8 reasons that Star Wars: The Clone Wars is better than the prequel trilogy, of which Development of a Wider Universe, Development of the Jedi ("Many episodes focus on Jedi who weren’t even named in the movies. These Jedi have personalities and relationships of their own, and they interact differently with the Jedi culture"), and Better Stories really resonated with me. On this last point, she makes a really excellent point:

This is the single most important reason “Clone Wars” is infinitely better than the prequels. ... They’re just better stories. They have beginnings, middles, and ends. They have sympathetic character drama and exciting plot twists. ...Clone Wars makes you care. That’s the basic thing every halfway decent story has to get out of an audience. And it’s the thing the prequels most ludicrously ignored.

So now that it's going to be ending, I've been quite sad. One of my coping mechanisms over the summer was to search for the best Clone Wars episodes and, fortunately, people have made their own suggestions for best episodes (here are two such examples: one and two).

For the first two-three seasons, I tried keeping up with them as they were shown, but with my increasing watching of football (both college and NFL) in the last couple of years, I waited until the springtime to bunch them up and watch them, roughly 3-4 at a time.  This method actually worked really well, since many of the story arcs lasted just that long, and it was great evening entertainment.  In the fourth and fifth season, I began to accompany my watching of them with pizza and beer, which made them quite enjoyable!

I may be drinking beer when I re-watch Star Wars: The Clone Wars

However, now that it is over (with some bonus "sixth season" material coming out sometime this spring), I realized there was a lot of material there - over 100 episodes(!), yielding over 43 hours - and that I didn't recall everything that went on.  I also am curious to see what they do with character development.  I remember being upset that Anakin somehow gets a padawan learner when I first saw the movie.  However, the character development they have done with Ahsoka Tano is really impressive and will be an important feature of the series!

So, I've come to the decision that I am going to re-watch all of the Clone Wars (after the football season is over, of course).  To help me do this, I decided that I would write about each of my own favorite episodes out of each season, perhaps I would then try to cobble together a final best episodes list.... 

So, look for them to be a part of my "Star Wars Wednesdays" series at my Drew's Views blog  :)