In a galaxy far, far away... [Star Wars omnibus thread]

[Yw-slayer]

Yeah, waiting till I have time to watch it on Blu Ray. So pretty much never? Although I may escalate priority as it has Donnie Yen.

[Leon]

I binge watched Star Wars Rebels Season 1 over the last day or so.

Before I persist, does it actually add anything to the Star Wars lore?

[JoshInKC]

Short answer: Yes, with caveats.
Longer answer: The showrunner - Dave Filoni, is the same guy who ran the Clone Wars animated show, which is no longer canon along with pretty much everything else pre 2014. He's been using Rebels to re-introduce characters and chunks of formerly canon and extended universe stuff to the current canon in big swaths. So its never going to be major stuff that you'll miss and wonder about if you only see the movies, but if you're familiar with the novels and enjoy the extended universe it's fun and cool.
For example, some of the ship designs from rebels show up in Rogue One, and on the most recent season finale of the show there's something of an explanation as to why the rebels were so gun-shy to commit larger forces to the assault at the end of Rogue One.

Also, the show gets better after the 1st season. A bit less kiddie.

[Rare White Ape]

Umm, sorta.

I'm halfway through season 3, so without spoiling too much...

It does involve a fair few plot lines that continue on from the Clone Wars animated series, which I haven't watched. The character Saw Gerrera was created for Clone Wars and ended up in Rogue One in a central role. He returns in an episode later in Rebels S3. There's a bit of Mandalorian stuff later on with Sabine, which again continues what Clone Wars explored. Darth Maul returns from Clone Wars and has a fairly central role where he is now agnostic to dark vs. light sides of the force and wants to use Ezra's abilities to unlock force secrets, which causes Ezra to dip dangerously close to dark side force usage on a few occasions. Plus central Clone Wars characters Ahsoka and Captain Rex make a return.

Outside of Clone Warsy stuff, the rest of the show pretty much chronicles the formation of the Rebel Alliance and features a lot of guest voices from OT cast members like Carrie Fisher, Anthony Daniels, Frank Oz and Billy Dee Williams. After season 1 Ezra decides to leave Lothal and continues on with the crew to help the Rebellion and learn to become a Jedi, so the show spends far less time at that planet. It gets a lot better once they free up the story line. The script gets into a lot of force mythology that they can't allocate enough time for in the films, which makes that worth watching, and explores a few leftovers from the Republic days. Plus there are the usual treats like space battles and badly trained Stormtroopers. I think it's worth watching and enjoy it highly.

The biggest treat: Grand Admiral Thrawn (formerly of now-non-canonical Thrawn Trilogy fame) is brought in as a central character of S3, to the delight of extended universe fans everywhere.

Where it goes from here, I can only guess that S3 ends by dovetailing nicely with Rogue One (a few Easter eggs from Rebels are present in that film), and I know for sure that season 4 will be the final in the Rebels series.

[Rare White Ape]

The showrunner - Dave Filoni, is the same guy who ran the Clone Wars animated show, which is no longer canon along with pretty much everything else pre 2014.

There's a bit of confusion around what Disney kept and what they threw out, but rest assured that the TV show and Clone Wars film from 2008 are still canon.

[Leon]

Okay, I might persist for now.

Good to know that it gets less kiddie after S1. That would be my major criticism of the series, which is to be expected when watching a cartoon

[Cam]

Although I may escalate priority as it has Donnie Yen.

I was enthralled by Rogue One. However, I think Yen's talents were wasted.

[Freude am Fahren]

Ron Howard to take over as director of Han Solo movie after current directors fired near the end of principal photography.

I'd love to know what they were doing wrong. From the sound of the quote from the LucasFilm exec, maybe they were going too dark?

[Kchrpm]

Actually I thought they were going too comedic. We'll..actually, I guess we won't see

[Freude am Fahren]

That could be true too. Pretty vague statement. Based on their previous work (Lego Movie), I still think it could go either way