Dave Filoni has proven to be quite the expert storyteller with the beloved animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels.
Filoni recently revealed to CinemaBlend that the former was originally intended to be a lot more like how Rebels turned out. He spoke of character concepts which are quite reminiscent of Rebels' fan-favourite gang of misfits - two Jedi who team up with a crew of black market smugglers - check out the quote below:
That was something that when I was working early on with Henry Gilroy, we were trying to figure out what the character makeup of the show was going to be and how we could produce a TV series based in the time of the Clone Wars because the Clone Wars is so vast and would require literally thousands of clones battling thousands of battle droids, and so we were shooting around more of an original trilogy idea of a crew, two Jedi that worked with these smugglers and black market. And we were coming up with a character makeup.
Frankly, that character makeup is very similar to what we ended up with in Rebels. It just goes to show you that those ideas don't really die.
Clone Wars was unceremoniously cancelled back in 2014 - only to be recently confirmed for a revival at some point next year. Rebels was brought about following the prequel-based animated series cancellation and brought to fruition many storylines and characters. It seems that, even without Clone Wars' cancellation, it still would've had a profound effect on its successor.
Filoni went on to explain that the series was originally going to focus on unintroduced smugglers because he didn't deem himself worthy of playing with George Lucas' toys. It was only after Lucas' tuition that the show shifted its focus to Anakin, Obi-Wan, and Ahsoka.
When we took this idea in to George, he looked at me, he was like 'Mmm.' So Anakin Skywalker is going to be doing this and Obi-Wan Kenobi's going to be doing this, and we just never presumed that we would be working with those characters. Because my idea was who am I to write Anakin Skywalker? That's a hugely important character. But George was like, 'Well, I'm going to teach you all about this.' And he did. So we wound up with the show we did under his direction.
What do you think of Filoni's comments? Which of his animated series is your favourite and why?