It’s All About The New Guys In STAR WARS REBELS

By Adam Holmes on Friday, January 24th, 2014

Star Wars Rebels seems to be Lucasfilm’s second biggest project with Disney outside of the film’s themselves. We don’t know too may details about the animated series other than it is taking place between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, follows both the Empire and the fledgling Rebel Alliance and will feature a new villain called the Inquisitor. However, if you were expecting any of your favorites from the films to be main characters, don’t get your hopes up. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, executive producer Simon Kinberg reiterated that the main protagonists would all be original, although he can’t give us details about them just yet.

There’s a lot of new characters in the show. The prequels were centered around the origin of familiar characters, there’s a lot of new characters in this show. The main characters are new characters.

While he couldn’t give much specific information on the show’s plot, Kinberg did talk a lot about the look and tone of the show. Unlike its animated predecessor Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Rebels is moving away from the computer animated look and moving towards a hand-made aesthetic that was prominent in the Original Trilogy.

The place we went back to as to a visual template was Ralph McQuarrie, who was one of the original concept artists for the original Star Wars films. His art is softer, a little more figurative, more of a feel of being drawn, less computer generated. The first few movies had a bit of a hand-made quality. We wanted the show to have that. There’s also in the archives where [creator George] Lucas keeps all the original art and props, there’s tons of art that’s McQuarrie’s musing on the Star Wars universe that was never used in the films. There’s places where we’ve quite literally taken world-creation or vehicles or creatures from his original art that was never used in the films and made that part of show.

Kinberg also mentioned that although the show will go into dark places featuring the Empire’s reign of terror over the galaxy, it’s still a “fun and character driven story” with the tone taking cues from the original films rather than the much more dark Revenge of the Sith.

I’m not too surprised by their decision to stick with new characters for the show. Sure, I’ll miss seeing Han and Chewie on their spice runs or Luke learning to become a Jedi, but since the events of the Empire’s reign hasn’t been covered outside of literature and comics, I’m interested to see the stories they’ll tell about that dark period in a galaxy far, far away. Plus, this might be the introduction to Star Wars for many of our youth, and if this gets them interested in the original movies and our favorite characters, I consider that a win.

I’m also glad they’re going for the hand-crafted approach for the show. While I don’t think The Clone Wars was a bad show, I did find it to be a little stiff at times. By going back to the basics and using concepts from the original art, this show will hopefully give off the same feel as the Original Trilogy.

I’m still not too sure about that Inquisitor guy, though. For an ancient organization that predicates itself on only having two Sith Lords at a time, there sure are a lot of guys with red lightsabers running around.