I received my Star Wars Insider today, and it features, among other things, an interview with Rebels executive producer Greg Weisman. As you might expect, it’s too early for him to be dropping many details about the show, but there are few things there and there. Though he admits that that the show already had “great characters and a great setup” by Dave Filoni and Simon Kinberg when he came on board, he had a few things to say on Rebels’ yet-to-be-revealed cast:
We have two strong female leads in the show among our set of characters and we think they are going to be fan favorites very quickly. That’s always been a personal priority for me in all the work I’ve done, to have a strong and diverse cast of characters, both in terms of gender and race.
He also praised Ahsoka on The Clone Wars, talked about Ralph McQuarrie’s influence on the show’s look and had a few things to say on how the Rebellion we see in the original trilogy is not quite there yet.
The article also features a few pieces of artwork I’m pretty sure we haven’t really seen yet, but I’ll let you guys go see that for yourselves.
StarWars.com, perhaps not so coincidentally, posted a video with Weisman today, where he echos some of his statements from the Insider interview, talks about his background with TV, and answers a few Star Wars questions:
Rebels is set to debut sometime in Fall 2014 on Disney XD. Most of what we already know about it is from presentations at NYCC (including our only cast member so far, ‘the Inquisitor’) and Celebration Europe.
And as a parting shot, here’s something for you to chew on from the video:
That’s good, then, that there will possibly me more gender-equality in Star Wars.
To be honest, as long as the characters are compelling, I couldn’t care less if they are all men, women, something in between, weird fish people, blue monkeys or crazy green space lizards. Okay, strike the lizard part, I am glad Han Solo didn’t turn out to be green and spooky. But I think the race and gender debate is so 1968 and shouldn’t matter one bit in the 21st century.
That being said, I hope the Ep7 rumors about female leads are true. Not for “gender equality” reasons, but for a change of pace.
It shouldn’t matter in 2013, but here we are still having to argue why we should see more protagonists and characters that aren’t white dudes.
And yeah, I’m getting really sick of people who need that explained to them. It should not be a foreign concept to anyone at this point, and yeah, we are just as sick of saying it as people are of hearing it. But clearly it still needs to be said.