Dave Filoni recently felt the wind come through his house and notice a
smell in the air. Then he told his wife, "It's football season and Clone Wars time. Here we go."
The return of both the NFL and Cartoon Network's popular Star Wars animated series are both big things in Filoni's life -- "As long as the Steelers offensive line holds up," he quips -- and The Clone Wars' supervising director is improving all aspects of the show in its fifth season premiering Sept. 29 (9:30 a.m. ET/PT).
Some
come out of what Filoni and crew did last season. They had to put
thousands of soldiers in scenes during the "Water War" trilogy that
began the year, and that's being exploited in Season 5 with places like
the capital city of the planet Onderon and the many, many people
animators have to include in shots.
VIDEO: Check out an exclusive clip from the 'Clone Wars' season premiere
"That's no small achievement," Filoni says. "If you look at a lot
of feature animated films, you'll actually see a lot of empty streets
all the time, and we attacked that head on.
"Our
mark is always, 'It's a Star Wars movie.' Let's make it and get it as
visually deep as one of George Lucas' live-action movies."
Filoni
has also focused on making the storytelling better, too -- although
what they did last year is nothing to sniff at, bringing back tattooed
Sith lord Darth Maul (voiced by Sam Witwer) from the dead and teaming
him with his equally dangerous brother Savage Opress (Clancy Brown).
Those
two will reignite their ongoing war with the Jedi but also make an
alliance with the Mandalorians this season, in which karma plays a major
role for many characters.
"Either they've
done evil things or they've preached certain ways," Filoni says, "and
now it's almost like everyone's mettle is going to be tested to see,
well, do you actually believe that? Lets see if you follow through with
it."
Anakin Skywalker (Matt Lanter), Obi-Wan
Kenobi (James Arnold Taylor), Ahsoka Tano (Ashley Eckstein) and the rest
of Jedi will be tested on that front as well as by the reappearance of
Count Dooku and his forces.
All in all,
though, the overarching idea for the lightsaber-swingers in the fifth
season is the fact that the Clone War has persisted a lot longer than
they ever hoped.
They wanted to wrap up this
war really quickly and just get it over with," Filoni explains. "That
was something Mace Windu said in Attack of the Clones: 'We are
keepers of the peace. We are not soldiers.' Well, they've been fighting
this soldiers' war now for years and years and years and leading all
this destruction, taking planets back, losing planets.
"There's
been a lot of strife in the galaxy, and one of the things they have to
come to terms with, a couple of times, is how responsible are they for
all of this? Or how responsible does the community, the people of the
Republic, think they are for what's happened to the galaxy."
It
begins to tie in with the political atmosphere of the movies, too, when
Palpatine accuses the Jedi of treason in the third prequel Revenge of
the Sith. "When he says the Jedi attacked him and left him scarred,"
Filoni says, "he's basically saying it was a political coup by the Jedi.
"A lot of the things we're doing this season help explain why that idea has any kind of traction."
The Clone Wars will also be exploring a lot of the Star Wars
criminal element and showing there's been some development in the
underworld. Maul and Opress aim to create their own army and that's the
first place they head for recruiting, and even the Jedi allied
themselves with the slug-like Hutts during the events of the Clone Wars animated movie.
As
the Jedi has been more focused on their big galactic war, they've let
go of things they used to watch, including crime in the streets. And
there'll be some repercussions to that.
"Black market, drug trafficking, these are all areas that Maul or someone like him can flourish," Filoni says.
Will more episodes in the Star Wars underworld lead to possibly a first Clone Wars
appearance from that scruffy, nerf-herding smuggler Han Solo? Don't
count on it, according to Filoni, unless Lucas gives the green light.
"To
me, Han Solo, Chewbacca, Princess Leia, Luke Skywalker, they're the
Mount Rushmore of the Star Wars universe. If those characters ever
appear on our screen through the Clone Wars, it's gotta come from George
Lucas himself," Filoni says.
"If a writer
ever tries to pitch Han Solo, I'll be like, 'No!' I shoot it down
because I want it to come from George. I want it to be organic because I
respect the fact that they're his characters and if he felt there was
another story to tell, then it would be appropriate to tell that story."
Fans
of the original movies will have to wait for Solo but they will get
some satiation in the return of Tarkin as well as cameos in the season
premiere from a blue Snaggletooth (akin to the one seen way back in the
cantina scene in the original Star Wars film) and a Kowakian
monkey-lizard who looks a lot like Jabba the Hutt's weird little pal
Salacious Crumb from Return of the Jedi.
Filoni
says he never knew what a Kowakian monkey-lizard was before he started
his current job, but now "it's been beaten into my brain.
"I
was never that good at math, but I could remember all these facts about
Star Wars. Now I guess I'm putting them to good use. That's my very
bizarre destiny but a destiny nonetheless."
USA Today