The Clone Wars Weekly Roundup

Welcome to this week’s The Clone Wars Weekly Roundup.

After taking a bit of a hiatus to provide a retrospective look back at the first three seasons of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, we are back with our regular weekly roundup of this week’s TCW news.

This past Friday saw the premier of Star Wars: The Clone Wars Season Four: Battle Lines.  The premier thrust us into the front lines of the Mon Cala civil war.

We won’t be reviewing the episodes in this column, but I will give a self serving plug to my reviews over on LightsaberRattling.com, Water War (4.01) and Gungan Attack (4.02).

There are some relatively big changes for Star Wars: TCW fans this season.  With the re-design of Starwars.com we have two major changes, one is good and one is bad.

To start with the positive, unlike previous seasons when you had to wait until Monday for the episode to appear as free streaming content on Starwars.com, now the episodes are free for all to view on Starwars.com starting on Saturday after the premier.  This is great for fans that do not have Cartoon Network and is a logical move in the face of on-line piracy.  I would much rather watch on Starwars.com on Saturday then watch a low quality version illegally and chance catching whatever viruses or Malware might be on the illegal streaming site.

The biggest change to Starwars.com is the content shift from written to visual.  While the focus on visuals makes for a very attractive site, it also means we are getting a lot less information about each TCW episode.  Previously you would get detailed summaries of the episode,  cast, crew and character information, and behind the scenes information.  Many of the little Easter eggs that are in the episodes were pointed out in the Episode Guides, as well as addressing continuity issues and inspiration for different characters or objects in the episode.  If you go to the slideshow section for each TCW episode, underneath each image there is a little information, but it is more of simply describing the image then what we used to get in the Episode Guides.  Author Dan Wallace addresses the format changes at StarWars.com in general without talking about the Episode Guides directly in his latest Blog.

If it wasn’t bad enough losing the Episode Guides, we have also have lost Dave Filoni’s video commentaries that used to accompany each episode.  This is a tremendous loss of content and hopefully something that is either resurrected or delivered in an alternate format.  I don’t think these changes will negatively impact viewership of the show, but for the more mature fans of the show, I think it does detract from the water cooler experience of talking about the show.

This Friday the third episode in the Mon Cala arc will appear, entitled Prisoners.  Starwars.com has a synopsis episode 4.03 Prisoners, along with some preview images and a video.

The synopsis is as follow:

“Crowns are inherited, kingdoms are earned.”

The Republic and Gungan forces have been captured by Riff Tamson and his Karkarodon enforcers. Now, it is up to Ahsoka and the young Prince Lee-Char to unite the fractured people of Mon Cala and drive out the Separatist invaders.

It certainly looks like we are up for an action packed conclusion to this story arc!  I can’t wait to find out what the next arc is going to be about after this one.  

Before we close this week, the crew here at the Star Wars Report would like to wish Ahsoka Tano actress and Her Universe Empress, Ashley Eckstein a very Happy Birthday.

 

Until next time, keep your Buy’ce on and your blaster handy.

– Pete

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