Initial Clone Wars Thoughts: Ambush
Oct. 6th, 2008 05:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerAfter taking care to attend an opening night showing for each of the new Star Wars movies (including The Clone Wars), it was a little frustrating to have to wait two days after the official "Cartoon Network" premiere for the first episode of the Clone Wars series to show up on CTV. It added a little more to that frustration to only get the first episode, putting us that much further behind the American airings in perpetuity, and when the episode did begin at last, it didn't take long to realise it was being shown in "pan-and-scan," which made me think back to how the preview special made specifically for the "Space" channel had included clips in widescreen... (Actually, those clips were pretty good, particularly the ones with Anakin and Padme on the same planet, and George Lucas mentioned that he's been interested in manga and anime for a while. Of course, we all know about his interest in live-action Japanese movies, but I suppose I could wonder how far that interest carried without ever "demanding" anything...) For all of that, though, my enjoyment of what I did get to see wasn't quashed.
I suppose I'd first thought that The Clone Wars would be broken back down into the "first episodes" I'd believed it to have been assembled from, and I can wonder how many other people might have also thought that and not gone as many times as they might have... but in some ways, leading off with an episode featuring Yoda seems to me to be a good starting point for the series, in part given that he didn't have a major role in the movie. In spotting the preview clips for the episode and hearing about what seemed "callbacks" to The Empire Strikes Back, I did wonder a little about my thoughts in the past that, should someone throw "differences between the prequels and TESB!" in my face, I could contemplate that perhaps Yoda's later character might have been shaped by an awareness of things he had and hadn't done before. (As far as "callbacks" go, too, I found myself enjoying to some small, strange degree Yoda laughing, perhaps because it just plain sounded right.) I suppose I also wondered a bit about whether I had assumed the Jedi had "taken the clonetroopers for granted" and how that had helped them be caught in "Order 66," but there a bit of thought turned up the idea that perhaps having been betrayed by not just his old apprentice some time before but by the clones he had trusted could have affected Yoda's uncompromising initial attitude towards Anakin's fall.
In any case, not only did the computer animation still look good on the small screen, so did the score sound about the same as before. I might have been hoping there would be some sort of confrontation between Yoda and Asajj Ventress at the end, and there the episode established quite clearly that she's way out of her depth facing Yoda. (However, she does seem to have learned one particular way to escape from an encounter with him...)
I suppose I'd first thought that The Clone Wars would be broken back down into the "first episodes" I'd believed it to have been assembled from, and I can wonder how many other people might have also thought that and not gone as many times as they might have... but in some ways, leading off with an episode featuring Yoda seems to me to be a good starting point for the series, in part given that he didn't have a major role in the movie. In spotting the preview clips for the episode and hearing about what seemed "callbacks" to The Empire Strikes Back, I did wonder a little about my thoughts in the past that, should someone throw "differences between the prequels and TESB!" in my face, I could contemplate that perhaps Yoda's later character might have been shaped by an awareness of things he had and hadn't done before. (As far as "callbacks" go, too, I found myself enjoying to some small, strange degree Yoda laughing, perhaps because it just plain sounded right.) I suppose I also wondered a bit about whether I had assumed the Jedi had "taken the clonetroopers for granted" and how that had helped them be caught in "Order 66," but there a bit of thought turned up the idea that perhaps having been betrayed by not just his old apprentice some time before but by the clones he had trusted could have affected Yoda's uncompromising initial attitude towards Anakin's fall.
In any case, not only did the computer animation still look good on the small screen, so did the score sound about the same as before. I might have been hoping there would be some sort of confrontation between Yoda and Asajj Ventress at the end, and there the episode established quite clearly that she's way out of her depth facing Yoda. (However, she does seem to have learned one particular way to escape from an encounter with him...)