Dave Filoni Confirms ‘Star Wars: The Clone Wars’ Was Initially More Like ‘Star Wars Rebels’

Dave Filoni proved himself as an impressive storyteller at Lucasfilm thanks to his success with the animated Star Wars: The Clone Wars before going on to develop Star Wars Rebels. With The Clone Wars being earlier in his career, he had to stray away from some of his original visions for the program, though Filoni pointed out that his plans for the core characters in that series ultimately became the dynamic utilized in Rebels.

“That was something that when I was working early on with Henry Gilroy, we were trying to figure out what the character makeup of the show was going to be and how we could produce a TV series based in the time of the Clone Wars because the Clone Wars is so vast and would require literally thousands of clones battling thousands of battle droids, and so we were shooting around more of an original trilogy idea of a crew, two Jedi that worked with these smugglers and black market,” Filoni shared at San Diego Comic-Con. “And we were coming up with a character makeup. Frankly, that character makeup is very similar to what we ended up with in Rebels. It just goes to show you that those ideas don’t really die.”

Clone Wars included some of the archetypes described above, with the Jedi Obi-Wan Kenobi, Anakin Skywalker, and Ahsoka Tano being the main protagonists, who frequently collaborated with clone trooper Rex to accomplish missions. Rebels, on the other hand, focused specifically on the members of the Ghost crew and their dealings with the budding Galactic Empire, as it was set between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope.

Filoni went on to detail that the reason for the shift in central characters came from a conversation with George Lucas, as he was still an important and active figure at Lucasfilm.

“When we took this idea in to George, he looked at me, he was like ‘Mmm.’ So Anakin Skywalker is going to be doing this and Obi-Wan Kenobi’s going to be doing this, and we just never presumed that we would be working with those characters,” the producer recalled. “Because my idea was who am I to write Anakin Skywalker? That’s a hugely important character. But George was like, ‘Well, I’m going to teach you all about this.’ And he did. So we wound up with the show we did under his direction.”

Fans will have to wait until this fall to see the dynamic of Filoni’s new animated series, Star Wars Resistance, when it debuts this fall. In 2019, Star Wars: The Clone Wars will return to Disney’s upcoming streaming platform, having previously been canceled without being granted an organic ending.

Do you wish that The Clone Wars had utilized Filoni’s original ideas? Let us know in the comments below or hit up @TheWolfman on Twitter to talk all things Star Wars and horror!

[H/T Cinema Blend]