Secrets of the Force

by Edward Gross

  SIMON KINBERG

  The thing that drove everyone working on the show is that we all love and take Star Wars so seriously. We didn’t want to do a show that was a mission of the week. It was so important to us for the characters to live and breathe as much as the characters in the movies do. The approach for everyone is not that it’s a cartoon, or it’s an animated show. It’s an adventure show about these characters that are going to live alongside the greatest characters of all time. They occupy the same universe as Luke, Leia, Han, and Darth Vader. We need characters that you could put in a scene with Darth Vader and not get eaten alive.

  * * *

  The next animated series, and least popular of the animated Star Wars series, was Star Wars: Resistance, set before and during the events of the sequel trilogy and focusing on New Republic pilot Kazuda Xiono, recruited by the Resistance to spy on the growing First Order. That show ran for just two seasons and forty episodes from 2018 to 2020.

  JUSTIN RIDGE

  (co-executive producer, Star Wars: Resistance)

  This was actually an idea that Dave Filoni had awhile back. He had this idea percolating about what was happening before the events of The Force Awakens. One day in his office, he called me in. He’s like, “Padawan, come over here.” He’s called me Padawan awhile. So I go into his office and he shows me this early concept art for Resistance and I leave. Later on, he calls me in and he’s like, “How would you like to show-run this show?” I was beyond honored that he was trusting me basically with the keys to this new car. “Okay, here you go. Crash it. Have fun.” I was just beyond honored.

  BRANDON AUMAN

  (head writer, Star Wars: Resistance)

  It was very intimidating. We broke the first set of stories at Skywalker Ranch, we got together with a bunch of writers. We just started talking about what would it be like six months to a year before The Force Awakens? What would happen? What is the state of the galaxy? What’s going on? It’s kind of a time of peace but it’s also—there’s some things boiling under the surface. The First Order is starting to rise, so we talked about Poe and the different characters that we want to bring in. Leia, obviously. We really just kind of spun it from there.

  * * *

  Although Resistance, which featured voice cameos from Oscar Isaac as Poe and Gwendoline Christie as Captain Phasma, helped tie the series into the sequels and improved substantially in its second year, it didn’t receive a third season with the studio migrating its Star Wars properties to its new streaming platform, Disney+.

  Launching in 2021 was The Bad Batch, told from the point of view of the title characters, a group of Dirty Dozen–like mercenaries having adventures in the early days of the Empire. The concept of The Bad Batch was introduced on Star Wars: The Clone Wars and revisited in a beloved arc of the final season.

  DAVE FILONI

  (executive producer, The Bad Batch)

  George wanted to explore the idea that there were clones that had, at birth, had specialized traits—and after the Clone 99 incident at the beginning of [The Clone Wars], the Kaminoans and the Republic have decided not to dispose of them, but to actually impose further mutation on them to create genetic supersoldiers. So the Bad Batch were the expression of this elite squad of supersoldiers. The writer, Matt Michnovetz, got really into The Bad Batch, which was very gratifying. Though I keep forgetting, he didn’t write the first arc, that was Brent Friedman. Matt talks about Bad Batch all the time—we were in Rebels and he’d be talking about the Bad Batch. It’s very different to have clones that aren’t quite clones. It works more in the original super-commando idea that you see Boba Fett being thought of in Empire, or along those lines.

  So, this was a funny joke, because I realized at one point that none of the clones outside of maybe Rex knew that Anakin was seeing Padmé, let alone married to her. So when you see the Bad Batch’s gunship on The Clone Wars, they actually have a [Padmé pinup design] on the nose. Anakin sees this and looks at Rex and is like, “What is that?” And the Bad Batch is like, “Oh yeah, that’s that senator from Naboo. She can negotiate with me any day.” They get on the shuttle and Anakin looks at Rex and is like, “That is not staying there.” I thought it was a funny look at the world. A bit of a World War II nod.

  * * *

  But Star Wars hasn’t always been so lucky on the small screen. Two highly anticipated projects George Lucas had personally shepherded before selling his studio to Disney both failed to materialize despite seemingly having vast potential. In the years prior to the Disney acquisition of Lucasfilm, the animation arm was working on several projects that Disney, after the acquisition, decided not to go forward with. The most infamous of these was the ill-fated Star Wars: Detours, a half-hour animated comedy series headed up by Robot Chicken cocreators Seth Green and Matthew Senreich. In the classic Lucasfilm tradition, nearly forty episodes of the show were completed before Disney made the decision not to air it. Rumors abound that it may still stream on Disney+ eventually.

  BRENDAN HAY

  (head writer, Star Wars: Detours)

  It was a totally unique process. George really had the vision. He figured everybody else had gotten to do Star Wars comedy except him, so, why not him, too? So he reached out to Matt and Seth and became friends with them, and liked their Robot Chicken stuff. The goal going in was, the point of view of the Robot Chicken Star Wars, but for all ages. So that was one of the guidelines for the show—to make it all ages.

  George had a very specific format, that, in 2010, seemed a little restrictive—but man, as always, he could see where things were headed. He wanted it to be a show that could be broken down into small sections, so it could be streamed and basically watched anywhere. So it was three six- to six-and-a-half-minute segments, and then two one-minute segments. That was the structure of the show. He had a lot of ideas about design, but otherwise it was just sort of, “Have fun. Set it in between the prequel trilogy and the original trilogy and do what you want. Pull the parts you want. Tell the stories you want.” He said early on, “Maybe it’s like, you do one thing on the Death Star, one thing on Tatooine, and one thing in Dex’s Diner. So you’re always varying up the worlds.” But other than that, we were given really free rein. We created some original characters—like specific stormtroopers or specific characters who worked in Jabba’s palace. But also giving more to characters like Dexter Jettster, who only had like one scene [in Attack of the Clones], and going, “Oh, is he the Sam Malone of Coruscant?” And our biggest fun was going with characters like Admiral Ackbar and the bounty hunters—who are iconic enough that everybody knows, but still have some real freedom to explore what the rest of their lives are like. Tarkin was another big one like that.

  GEORGE LUCAS

  (executive producer, Star Wars: Detours)

  This one is definitely off the charts, it’s purely to have fun. We’ve always been working outside the box, but this is so far outside the box it’s … a space shopping mall.

  SETH GREEN

  (cocreator, Star Wars: Detours)

  That’s been the mandate at every turn, is make it more fun, make it more silly. Never in a way that’s disrespectful to the lore, but always in a way that gets you into the stuff that you know. But I think it’s accessible to people who have never seen it, too.

  * * *

  Another series that never came to fruition was the Lucas-created Star Wars: Underworld, announced at the same time as The Clone Wars. Art and concept designs were created and Ronald D. Moore, Chris Chibnall, Fiona Seres, Stephen Scaia, and many other top sci-fi writers from around the world were brought on to write the first fifty scripts for the series. While that was being done, Lucas attempted to develop the technology to produce a high-end series at television budgets. After exploring production of the show with several networks, including Syfy, no one in the prestreaming era was willing to foot the bill for the series, feeling Star Wars was a property on the wane. Expectations that the show would commence continued, though, until the Disney
acquisition put the final nail in the coffin.

  * * *

  Star Trek: The Next Generation and Battlestar Galactica writer Ronald D. Moore told Collider of the project, “I was one of several writers they assembled … We would gather up at Skywalker Ranch once every six to eight weeks and we would break stories together, and right after we’d go off and write some drafts and bring ’em back, and George and we would sit down and critique them, and then do another draft and break more stories. It was great! We wrote somewhere in the forty-something, forty-eight scripts, something like that … The theory was George wanted to write all the scripts and get ’em all done and then he was gonna go off and figure out how to produce them, because he wanted to do a lot of cutting-edge technological stuff with CG and virtual sets and so on. And what happened was we wrote the scripts and then George said, ‘Okay, this is enough for now, and then I’ll get back to you.’ And then like a year or something after that is when he sold Lucasfilm to Disney.”

  PETER HOLMSTROM

  (co-host, The Rebel & the Rogue podcast)

  Underworld was meant to be George’s final “Fuck you, Hollywood” statement. He had bought land with the plans to build a large live-action studio and soundstages there—he was going to build his own Pinewood—so he’d never have to negotiate with corporations again. The plan was to film Underworld and the Star Wars sequels there, but those plans fell through.

  * * *

  Despite the setbacks, Star Wars would still have a bright future on television. Representing what would be the next quantum evolution in the Star Wars franchise was the arrival on Disney+ of the Mandalorian TV series, which helped launch the new streaming platform. That show, an immediate hit among the critics and the fans, will eventually be joined by Andor, focusing on Rogue One’s Cassian Andor, a third that will see Ewan McGregor reprising his role of Obi-Wan Kenobi, and a litany of additional series including shows devoted to Ahsoka Tano, Boba Fett, and the rangers of the New Republic.

  The Mandalorian, a space Western series in the tradition of Lone Wolf and Cub, was created by Jon Favreau and set five years following the events of Return of the Jedi. The title character is bounty hunter Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal), who has acquired the nickname “Mando” through his various successful missions in the outer rim. Often focused on the seedier underpinnings of the Star Wars universe, The Mandalorian is noted for its strong writing, lavish visuals, and arguably the cutest addition to the Star Wars canon since the Ewoks, in the form of “The Child” (aka Grogu), dubbed by pop culture as “Baby Yoda.”

  DAVE FILONI

  (executive producer, screenwriter/director, The Mandalorian)

  The important thing about the Mandalorians is to realize that they are a culture, and like any culture in our world, they change and evolve. They have highs and lows. They adapt. If you’re a warrior race for thousands of years, at some point you probably almost got yourself destroyed or destroyed yourselves, which would have a pretty devastating effect on your people. But the big question is, if that is truly who you are in your soul and in your heart, how long and how successfully can you deny that? I think that makes it a lot more interesting to them as a civilization. We really knew from the get-go that we wanted the Mandalorians to be a very high-tech, sophisticated military society. They can resort to barbarism when they’re on the run and when they’re weak and they don’t have a lot of resources—but like any military, they need resources, they need backup, they need fuel. So many tank battles simply die out because they ran out of fuel—as you discover if you study military history.

  The Mandalorian series idea really starts with Jon Favreau coming forward saying he’d like to develop a concept and talking with Kathleen Kennedy about it. She knew I had done a lot with Mandalorian people and culture on Clone Wars with George Lucas over the years. She also knew that I knew Jon Favreau. She called me in when Jon pitched this idea, and he really loved the imagery of a lone gunman and Western. When we were kids, Boba Fett was a “Man with No Name.” Even his publicity stills were evocative of the Sergio Leone Dollar trilogy. Jon’s idea was to reimagine that character as a straight-on bounty hunter and take that imagery of the lone gunfighter. The revelation was this idea of this child in a Lone Wolf and Cub sensibility.

  JON FAVREAU

  (creator, screenwriter, The Mandalorian)

  A Mandalorian is alluded to in the original films that I grew up with. Boba Fett was a bounty hunter and he wore Mandalorian armor. There was such a fascination with that character even though he didn’t do much in the films. And I like the image of the Mandalorian, because it really does hearken back to the Westerns and samurai films that had originally influenced Lucas. That’s a great, mysterious, fun character to see the world through.

  As somebody who grew up with Star Wars, and really having been formed around what I experienced when I was little with the first film, there was some aesthetic to it that I think that I really loved, that I really gravitated to, and my whole taste in movies was probably formed in a big way from seeing George Lucas’s original film. I learned about cinema through the lens of that film, because my father would explain to me, “This is a lot like a samurai movie, this is a lot like Westerns, or World War II films.” So that became my inroad. Then there was the whole Power of Myth with Joseph Campbell and the special that was filmed up at the ranch and that opened me up to the mythic structure and the mono-myth and my understanding of mythology and storytelling. So to return to this with the freedom that this new platform affords, because there’s nothing to compare it to. Nothing has been on TV other than the Holiday Special and the idea of telling us the story in just a few hours over several years opens us up to this novelization of story and a return back to the roots in many ways of the Saturday afternoon serial films. My parents’ generation grew up with cliffhanger adventures, and drawing from that type of stylish storytelling lends itself really well to what we’re tackling here.

  It’s fun not to have a preciousness to the way we’re telling stories, because we’re coming back to you next week with another one. To engage the audience in the way that I enjoy being engaged with, with the shows, specifically what the BBC has done with the streaming services, where it’s bigger-budget and has the qualities of a film, but with serialized storytelling. To me, that’s where it really opened up a lot of freedom and opportunity, where we don’t feel that we’re repeating or copying anything else that people have experienced from Star Wars.

  DAVE FILONI

  I think as a kid growing up, you watch Star Wars and you think, “I would watch this every week.” I remember when Star Trek: The Next Generation came out with the promise of better visual effects on television and it took big leaps. As somebody that’s always been into fantasy science fiction, you were always waiting for a moment where you thought the images on television were as good as what we were seeing in the theater. But there was a big separation when I was a kid. Now I think it’s gotten so close and one of the thrilling things is we can make something like Star Wars. Technology has advanced to the point where we can do this and that’s one of the dreams George had. When I worked with him on Clone Wars, he would talk about the future being streaming episodic serialized Star Wars. It’s cool to get to help make it happen.

  * * *

  To make that work, The Mandalorian has also been a pioneer in visual effects, not unlike the Star Wars films that preceded it. In this case, it has been the use of state-of-the-art visual effects in which the episodes are largely shot in a studio in front of a series of large LED screens and the backgrounds are programmed using an Unreal game engine, allowing the images to move with the camera and rendering the need for a green screen on these shots obsolete. It is one of the most significant advances in visual effects since the groundbreaking work of Lucas in digital effects on the prequel trilogy in the early 1990s. The series’ special effects supervisor, Richard Bluff; the chief technology officer of Epic Games, Kim Lebreri; and showrunner Jon Favreau did four months of R&D with produc
tion beginning in October 2018.

  PHIL GALLER

  (co-CEO, Lux Machina)

  I was involved very early on, because we had been doing Solo and Rogue One, and all these things are really leading up to this moment. At Lux we had actually deployed a real time system of camera tracking in February of 2018 and I don’t think anyone except maybe David Morin, the head of the Epic Games Los Angeles Lab, had put the pieces together yet. David saw me do a presentation in March about the technology and the workflow using camera tracking in a game engine and it was about March or April when Lucasfilm reached back out and asked if we would be willing to come back onboard and help with this from the point of view of display and engineering and camera sync. And at that point, I think that everyone realized that we all had been independently working on something and it had all come to a head. Lucasfilm and Jon and Epic had some really awesome stuff. The stuff they did looked amazing, so it was an opportunity to go into this new world. The technology matured very quickly and we all got to the same spot. I think it was something we had all been chasing for a decade.