from E! News Online
Obi-Wan is 'tooning up for some small-screen Jedi hijinks.
Star Wars: Clone Wars, a series of animated shorts featuring the epic battles often mentioned but never seen in the Star Wars films, is being prepped for its fall premiere on the Cartoon Network.
The first installment in the series, a collaboration between the AOL Time Warner-owned cable net and Lucasfilm, was previewed earlier this month at the Television Critics Association meeting, and buzz is building online for the 'toons, which are being helmed by Genndy Tartakovsky of Samurai Jack and Dexter's Laboratory fame.
Each Clone Wars adventure will run two-to-three minutes and focus on Obi-Wan Kenobi, Anakin Skywalker and their cohorts as they lead the Galactic Republic against evil armies of cloned troopers created by the Separatists. Put together, the strip tells one continuous story and includes tangents into minor characters' stories as well.
"It's beautiful-looking and there will be plenty of action," says Cartoon Network spokeswoman Laurie Goldberg.
The three-minute clip shown to the press was a rough cut, with a temporary soundtrack and some unfinished effects. The story featured Chancellor Palpatine putting Anakin in charge of a clone regiment over the protests of Yoda and Obi-Wan.
Tartakovsky, who like George Lucas was inspired by the epic films of Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, says the series is "going to be very high quality."
"It'll be like little mini-features, because everything is really hand-crafted and we're really taking our time with everything because we respect Star Wars so much," he said in an interview earlier this year on starwars.com.
Clone Wars is expected to debut November 9 and each episode will arrive at regularly scheduled intervals.
"It's going to air from 8 p.m. to 8:03 p.m. and probably rerun at 10 o'clock or midnight...[But] it's going to be at the same time every night so people will know when to look for it," explains Goldberg. "This is a great way to test something and see how people will respond to it."
She says network programmers are discussing various options for how to roll out the 'toons, but the likeliest scenario will see the cable channel present the first 10 episodes in the fall and another 10 in the spring.
The Cartoon Network is also talking with Lucasfilm about extending their partnership to include the possibility of creating a stand-alone Star Wars animated series.
Unlike the much-ballyhooed Animatrix animated shorts, which included key plot points referenced in The Matrix Reloaded, Clone Wars' story line will not necessarily set up Episode III, according to the cable network.
But when pressed for specifics, the Stars Wars camp was predictably mum. "Your guess is as good as mine," says Lucasfilm's Jeannie Cole.
Joshua Griffin of TheForce.net, one of the Internet's biggest Star Wars fan sites, tells E! Online that as far as he and his crew know, the animated series "will be showing the majority of the Clone Wars, and Episode III begins with the finale of that conflict and Palpatine's rise to power."
So far, the only real complaints from the oft-skeptical Star Wars set is that the 'toons aren't long enough.
"While it would have been great to see more of the Clone Wars on the big screen and less of Jar Jar," says TheForce.net's Scott Chitwood, "fans have been waiting for another Star Wars animated series for a long time [after Droids and Ewoks series in the mid-'80s], so there's a lot of enthusiasm around this project. They have a great team working on it and everything they've shown so far looks fantastic."
