Category: star wars on tv

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Rebels posters promote the Empire across the web

Rebels poster (Empire)Rebels poster (IGN)

Lucasfilm paired with six entertainment sites to release posters promoting Rebels. The six Imperial propaganda posters appear at Empire Online, IGN, Mashable, the Brazilian Omelete, TheForce.net and Entertainment Tonight. The posters are by Lucasfilm’s Amy Beth Christenson.

Card versions will be part of a special mailing that will go out to 2,500 individuals around the world – no word on how those people were chosen, but they’ll be in the mail tomorrow, apparently.

While it’s nice to see at least something official come out of Rebels after the recent LEGO-based leaks, I’m not sure how much these do to vent frustration. They’re nice, and they’re new, but they don’t really tell us anything we don’t already know about the show. Still, hopefully this is a sign that we’re getting closer to some real announcements.

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Roundup: Spin-off release date rumors, Phil Tippett and a closer look at the Rebels LEGOs

SPINOFF RUMORS: Take seriously at your own risk.Buzz. Could the first spinoff film be pushed back to 2017? That’s what Ali Arikan is claiming on Twitter today. Considering we know next to nothing about it, I find it hard to get too worked up if this proves true. And if it does mean more time between actual Episodes (like the traditional three years,) I’m all for it.

Alumni. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, effects guru Phil Tippett doesn’t totally write off the idea of coming back to Star Wars. Meanwhile, Billy Dee tells Blastr he still hasn’t heard anything about returning.

Rebels. Jedi News has some nice pictures of the LEGO minifigures that have been causing such a fuss.

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Meet Rebels’ resident astromech, Chopper

I don’t know why all this Star Wars TV stuff is coming out of Germany lately, but here you have it: Dave Filoni and crew introducing a grumpy new astromech droid from Rebels, Chopper.

Chopper

Meanwhile, there’s also some toy-based hints we might see Vader on Rebels. Yeah, it was more or less inevitable, but I admit I am a bit surprised that it may happen early enough to be in the first round of toys.

UPDATE: Chopper is now on StarWars.com, with a first look at (of course,) the Hasbro version.

Chopper action figure.

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Kinberg: Rebels takes cues from the Original Trilogy

McQarrie X-Wing

Executive producer Simon Kinberg talks Rebels with Entertainment Weekly today. He touches on quite a few things, but no real bombshells… Or are there?

Thematically and politically, it goes to some dark places. But for the tone of the show we took our cues from the original movies, which had fun and adventure and swashbuckling with emotion and grounded human characters. We took all our cues from the original films. Obviously there are slight tonal differences between New Hope, Empire and Jedi. But I think the closest intended voice of the show is A New Hope. So there are places where we get into darker backstories, there are places we see how cruel and malevolent the Empire can be, but for the most part it’s a fun and character-driven story.

On Vader or Palpatine appearing:

I don’t think I’m allowed to answer that. I can say that wherever possible we would want to use the original talent.

On the heroes:

There’s a lot of new characters in the show. The prequels were centered around the origin of familiar characters, there’s a lot of new characters in this show. The main characters are new characters.

On Pablo Hidalgo, “the resident Star Wars genius” and bringing in things from the Expanded Universe:

He will say there’s a cool cantina in this comic book from 1994, or a cool creature that not all of us know. He will bring that stuff to us. Or we’ll task him we’re trying to create a muscle for this villain with a cool backstory. Sometimes it will be a character or a planet we don’t know about. Instead of being just an Easter egg, sometimes it will turn into an a whole episode.

Begin your reading between the lines…

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Fisher, Hamill and Ford to start in ‘March or April?’

J.J. Abrams said this weekend that Episode VII will begin filming in May; Now Carrie Fisher is telling TV Guide that she, Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford will start in March or April. (And yes, none of the actors have been officially confirmed yet, but that hasn’t stopped her before.) Maybe it’s a misquote for ‘spring,’ or maybe Episode VII isn’t a mystery box so much as a confusion box? Or they’re all going to tour Highclere Castle Downton Abbey as team-building exercise? (via)

In any case: “I’d like to wear my old [cinnamon buns] hairstyle again — but with white hair,” Fisher also said. “I think that would be funny.”

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Remaining episodes of The Clone Wars on German TV… Next month?

Jedi News has a (translated) German press release that says the “sixth season” of The Clone Wars will be debuting on the channel SuperRTL on February 15. They’ll be showing one arc each Saturday, apparently.

And on that note, StarWars-Union.de has descriptions of the first set of episodes. Under the cut are eight episode descriptions from SuperRTL, translated by Union’s Christoph Wolf.

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Filoni weighs in on Darth Maul: Son of Dathomir

Darth Maul: Son of Dathomir (crop)

On his Facebook today, The Clone Wars’ supervising director Dave Filoni weighs in on how the storyline that’s becoming the Darth Maul: Son of Dathomir comic would have fit into the show:

The story of Darth Maul had become an important one for the series and it was only fitting that we chose him for a comic adaptation. The comics will be based on four finished scripts that were written for Season 6 . These scripts came out of one of our story conferences with George Lucas. As they moved through the production pipeline, they became finalized scripts with a great deal of the actual design work completed. The designs you will see, the plot lines, and character development in these comic books are all coming directly from the TV production. I turned over all of the art to Dark Horse so they could create an accurate representation of what we were planning for the show.

He also hints that the ending of this storyline might not necessarily mean the end of Maul.

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Dark Horse to wrap up Darth Maul’s arc on The Clone Wars

Clone-Wars-Darth-Maul-Son-of-DathomirWhile we’ve known that the “bonus content” being worked on for The Clone Wars wasn’t necessarily going to bring closure to the series, Lucasfilm told Newsarama that at least one of the show’s loose ends will be told in comic form this spring, giving a big finale both for Darth Maul and for Dark Horse Comics.

Darth Maul: Son of Dathomir will be a four-part comic starting in May, based on unproduced screenplays. Newsarama interviews the writer, Jeremy Barlow, on what’s in store for this tale. With a title of Son of Dathomir, one might expect a return to the planet, and revenge against Darth Sidious, but Barlow also teases some more locales and characters as well, including a new one named Brother Viscus.

Newsarama points out that while this unproduced story arc is being told first in comic form, it doesn’t mean that it will only be told in this form. I wouldn’t take this as anything more than Lucasfilm simply leaving the door open, and not as a sign that it will be actually realized in animated form.

Although Newsarama is calling this storyline the series finale, the show’s “final arc,” there’s been some clarification from Lucasfilm folks:

The Maul comic is very cool, but it *wasn’t* the series finale. It was a 4-part arc that fell beyond what was already in production.
— Pablo Hidalgo (@infinata) January 8, 2014

Long story short: It wraps up the Darth Maul arc, but isn’t the show’s intended finale. Pablo also says it wasn’t intended for S6.

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Rebels hints in LEGO 2014 lineup?

The LEGO Summer 2014 catalog has slipped out, and its Star Wars lineup offers a few hints for Rebels – and possibly more of The Yoda Chronicles? When the list of toy sets first started slipping out, Peter at Lightsaber Rattling explained what some of the set names might mean, while more recently Tomás at Groove Bricks got the list set descriptions, which puts most of the speculation to rest, and introduces some characters from Rebels.

The Ghost set, which is spotted in some online pictures of the catalog, is pretty clearly The Ghost, the new ship of Star Wars Rebels, revealed last year, and has a minifigure of a character named Zeb. The Phantom comes with a minifigure with a second character name: Ezra Bridger.

Join the Rebel resistance against the evil Empire in The Phantom attack shuttle, as seen in the exciting Star Wars: Rebels animated TV series! Place young Rebel hero Ezra Bridger in the detachable cockpit and store his cadet helmet and blaster in the carg
Fly The Phantom into battle against the evil Empire!

Jason Ward over at Making Star Wars pieces all the names (and ships) together.]

The other hard-to-decipher set name is what most sites are calling Jedi Hunter (or Jedi Hunter Frontier) while Groove Bricks also found a source calling it Jedi Scout Fighter. While Lightsaber Rattling originally speculated that it’s a Rebels-themed set, the minifigure list connects it to The Yoda Chronicles, with a new version of JEK-14. Unless JEK-14 (the Force-powered clone from The Yoda Chronicles) jumps from the LEGO Star Wars specials to Rebels, it seems that this set is a follow-up to 2013′s set based on The Yoda Chronicles. Does that mean that more adventures of JEK-14 are coming to the screen next year, since his fellow figures aren’t ones that I recognize from the three episodes of The Yoda Chronicles?

Also coming out this summer from LEGO: a new snowspeeder, AT-AT, Star Destroyer, B-Wing and Mos Eisley Cantina! Lots of love for original trilogy this summer.

So, we have a few more merchandise-related leaks for Rebels, and a sign that there might be more follow-up to The Yoda Chronicles?

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Mythbusters takes on Star Wars tonight

Mythbusters-StarWars-titleThe circle is now complete! Mythbusters, the Discovery Channel show that attempts to confirm or bust urban legends and Hollywood magic by recreating the circumstances and using science to explain, is leading off their 2014 season with a special devoted to Star Wars.

The January 4 episode (Discovery at 8pm ET/PT) features hosts and former ILM special-effects experts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, along with team members Grant Imahara, Tory Belleci, and Kari Byron as they verify the plausibility of several epic Star Wars stunts. Joined by R2-D2, Chewbacca, members of the 501st Legion and actress Sophia Bush, the two build teams will take on some of the favorite scenes, hoping to find out answers to questions posed by Star Wars fans for years:

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