Sci-Fi Storm

It has been officially announced that Star Wars: The Clone Wars will “wind down”, and is no longer being produced for Cartoon Network. However, it isn’t quite over yet. Here is the official announcement (from www.starwars.com):

As we enter into an exciting new era focused on the next Star Wars trilogy, Lucasfilm has decided to pursue a new direction in animated programming. We are exploring a whole new Star Wars series set in a time period previously untouched in Star Wars films or television programming. You can expect more details in the months to come.

As part of this shift, we have also made some key decisions affecting Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Star Wars Detours.

After five highly successful and critically acclaimed seasons of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, we feel the time has come to wind down the series. While the studio is no longer producing new episodes for Cartoon Network, we’re continuing production on new Clone Wars story arcs that promise to be some of the most thrilling adventures ever seen. Stay tuned for more information on where fans can soon find this bonus content. In the video below, Supervising Director Dave Filoni offers a peek of what is to come in Star Wars: The Clone Wars.

At Star Wars Celebration VI last year, George Lucas gave fans a glimpse at the animated comedy series Star Wars Detours from Seth Green, Matthew Senreich, and Todd Grimes. Detours was conceived and produced before we decided to move forward with the new Star Wars trilogy, and in the wake of that decision, Lucasfilm has reconsidered whether launching an animated comedy prior to the launch of Episode VII makes sense. As a result, we’ve decided to postpone the release of Detours until a later date.

We are incredibly proud of the teams at Lucasfilm Animation for creating some of the most amazing animation ever produced for TV. Keep checking StarWars.com for new developments on these and future projects.

How this additional “bonus content” will be presented is a big question. It is obvious from the video (included below) that production was already under way on what would have been a 6th season. And rumors have been swirling that it was likely the show would move to Disney XD from Cartoon Network, after Disney purchased Lucasfilm. But it sounds like if there is a 6th season, it will be abbreviated with what they already have and perhaps a few additional story lines to round it out.

It does seem like the series would need to end soon. It’s starting to pull up to the time where Episode III starts, so time was getting short. You didn’t want to just keep spinning without the story advancing – and we know where it needs to end up.

As for the “new series”, good money is on it being set at the time of the Old Republic, about 10,000 years prior, where several books and games have been set. Although there are some established canon (in the greatly convoluted Star Wars canon at least – did you know there are actually defined levels of canon in the Lucasfilm Holocron? These would be “C-canon”, the third level behind movies and TV), but it’s a pretty wide-open era for telling stories without fear of breaking classic continuity.

I haven’t told my kids yet…they still haven’t gotten over the fact that Ahsoka left at the end of the 5th season…it might be like telling them that we’ve canceled our next trip to Walt Disney World…which will be during Star Wars Weekends. Oh, I’ll be trying to corner a few people and grill them…

Here is the video from Dave Filloni explaining it – and showing the as-yet-unseen scene (note: wider than most videos I post on the site, so it might throw off the site format a bit):