Lucasfilm has released the first trailer for the upcoming fifth season of its popular CGI adventure series, Star Wars: The Clone Wars.
At the end of season four, we saw the resurrection of Darth Maul, a character ‘killed’ in the new trilogy of films. Now that he’s back in this series, which effectively serves as a midquel between Episode 2-3, we’ll get to see him wage war against pretty much everyone.
No longer content to be working for a ‘Sith Lord’ who isn’t really a Sith, Darth Maul will be fighting the Republic and the separatists, and oversee the beginnings of the evil Empire which becomes the focus of the original trilogy.
“There’s a lot of payoff coming.” said supervising director Dave Filoni in a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly. “I think people are going to see ways ‘The Clone Wars’ ties together more and more with ‘A New Hope.’ We’re setting up elements that eventually become the Empire.”
Personally, I’ve loved this series, and it just keeps getting better. Even Jar-Jar is great in this story, which is difficult to write. This season should be even more interesting to watch – knowing that it’s now part of the film canon.
“This is Star Wars, and I don’t make a distinction between [Clone Wars] and the films,” Lucas said in an interview released by SciFiNow – a science-fiction enthusiast magazine based in the UK – during last season.
For the uninitiated, the Star Wars stories are broken into multiple canon levels, with the films being the highest level canon, side projects by Lucas, like holiday specials and cartoons being a second tier of canon, and the books and guides occupying the bottom rung. Each level of canon supersedes any conflicting information in the rungs below.
That Lucas considers The Clone Wars to be on the same top-rung along with the six films is a pretty big deal for Star Wars fans.
The fifth season of Star Wars: The Clone Wars kicks off this September on the Cartoon Network.
