Is the new Disney cartoon show Star Wars: Rebels more than a Star Wars cartoon? Is it worth your time, and why does that one guy have a little soul-patch beard? For answers to these questions and more, here’s a look at the first five episodes of Rebels, and what they say about why we care about tie-in media and the rising interest in Star Wars thanks to the forthcoming sequels.
NO Spoilers yet, you will be warned later!
Occasionally resembling a moving painting, Star Wars: Rebels looks lovely. And it should; most of the show’s aesthetics are directly lifted from the 1970’s Ralph McQuarrie concept paintings which helped shape the look of the original film before anyone touched a camera. So, to say the same thing again, but cynically; Rebels takes its look from the sloppy-seconds of discarded Star Wars-stuff and successfully crafts an inoffensive and market-tested product which works subliminally off of recycled nostalgia. (Even if the target audience—whoever they are, kids?—are unaware of the nostalgia.)
Judging the inherent quality of any tie-in media like Rebels is a tricky critical conversation to have because the thing being examined is always working from a deficity of legitimacy. It’s not fair to compare tie-in media to its more legit “cousin,” but we can’t help it. If the Star Wars movies are like horses, then Star Wars: Rebels or The Clone Wars are like ponies. Sure, they’re cute, but they’re not real horses.
Somewhere in the backs of many of our minds “tie-in” equals “substitute.” If we can’t get real Star Wars movies, then we turn to the books, comics, and cartoons to get our fix. Obviously, tie-in media isn’t always like this and more often than not, exceeds expectations (which are usually low) and becomes its own thing. Keeping this related just to Star Wars, I’ll be the first to admit my initial feelings about The Clone Wars were a bit harsh, and I think it turned out to be an important and vibrant part of Star Wars that was actually capable of doing things the films never could do. As anyone who loves tie-in fiction knows, this is exactly why it can be great; making things you love about a fictional world more vibrant without competing with the original thing itself. Still, no matter how “good” The Clone Wars was, not even its biggest fan would suggest its theatrical release deserved an Academy Award nomination, as we all know the first Star Wars movie does. Ponies do not usually spontaneously turn into horses.
If you’re reading this you probably like Star Wars, so you probably hate it when Star Wars gets “ruined.” Funnily enough, what we talk about when we talk about Star Wars getting “ruined” is also the history of Star Wars itself. The entire franchise started out because George Lucas wanted to remake/ruin Flash Gordon. Then, before there was even an Empire Strikes Back, Alan Dean Foster wrote a book sequel called Splinter of the Mind’s Eye (which saves/ruins the Force) followed by a screenplay which was re-written/ruined a few times by different people, and then directed by Irving Kershner who saved/ruined it from the things that George Lucas put in that tried to ruin/save it. We don’t even need to get to Jedi, the Christmas Special, the 1997 Special Editions, or the prequels to further prove how much Star Wars being “ruined” is an uneasy part of its history.
So, is Star Wars: Rebels ruining “real” Star Wars, for real? The answer is a swift and simple “no,” and that’s because the show is inoffensive and because it doesn’t count as real Star Wars.
WAIT! If you’re strong with the Force (meaning you read the Internet as much as I do) then you know that indeed and in fact Star Wars: Rebels does count because along with the six films, the new films, The Clone Wars, and the new novels, the Lucasfilm Story Group says this is “really” part of the larger canon, and everything else is “Legends.” And yet, just because the Story Group wants to call a pony a horse doesn’t make it true. My mind can make me believe that Rebels is a sequel to The Clone Wars, but I can’t make myself believe it counts. It’s a cartoon, it looks different. It’s really close and it sounds right (which is hugely important) but by sheer virtue of the fact that literally every character is a wise-cracker and makes overt winky-references to existing classic Star Wars dialogue, means the illusion that this is “really” Star Wars is cracked from the beginning. To put it another way, Star Wars: Rebels is too pandering toward its source material, which makes it likeable, but doesn’t make it “count.”
SPOILER ZONE: Brief summaries of the first five episodes of Star Wars: Rebels below.
The first real episode, “Spark of a Rebellion,” is making no bones about having you think of Ezra Bridger as a Skywalker-esque figure. He’s a lonely kid with no family and no purpose. He quickly meets up with a scrappy crew who all fly around on a Millenumm Falcon-ish freighter called “The Ghost.” This motley crew includes a muscle-y alien with a temper named Zeb, who has an Australian accent and is taken directly from Ralph McQuarrie designs for a less-hairy Chewbacca.
Then there’s Sabine, who wears a pink Boba Fett/Mandalorian armor get-up and who likes explosions. Hera is the super-funny Twi’lek pilot of the Ghost, who also acts as the voice of reason. Then, there’s Kanan, who has a soul-patch, and a ponytail and is a Jedi in hiding, because he survived Order 66 when he was like super-young. This gets revealed at the end of the episode as the gang frees some Wookiee slaves.
Ezra has blue hair and is resourceful. If you think of his character being exactly like Aladdin in the first 30 minutes of Disney’s Aladdin, you won’t be confused. His character is that straightforward. Oh, the’ve also go a cute droid named Chopper, who actually is inexplicably cute in an R2-D2 way without actually being R2-D2. (Would I think Chopper was cute if Chopper came first? There’s no way to know. See why it’s so hard to figure out if this show is good or not?)
“Droids in Distress” is the second episode of Rebels and it features a “walk-on” role from C-3PO and R2-D2. This episode establishes what looks to be a repeating plot of the show: the gang intercepts a shipment of something and tries to redirect it. In this case, it’s a big shipment of super-evil Rifles which have been banned by the Senate. These rifles were also responsible for killing all of Zeb’s people, so he’s feeling even more Hulk-Smash than “normal.” C-3PO and R2-D2 at first seem to be working for the Empire, but at the end of the episode, it’s revealed they’re really working for Bail Organa, who we all remember fondly as President Santos Jimmy Smits. The weird implication here is that Jimmy Smits has ordered R2-D2 to gather intel about “the Rebels,” implying that the Rebels on Rebels aren’t part of the real Rebellion yet. This show takes place about five years before regular Star Wars (A New Hope) so I guess it’s claiming that freelance Rebels like these guys are the true “spark” that establishes the later organized Rebellion in the films. Hopefully, this means the gang will end up actually meeting cool Rebellion characters like Mon Mothma and Admiral Ackbar later in the series.
The third episode, “Fighter Flight,” is borderline unwatchable mostly because of how totally boring it is. Ezra and Zeb have to go get a special kind of fruit for Hera, but when they can’t find it, they have to steal a TIE Fighter and fly it around awkwardly. Notably, this episode reemphasizes one reason why the Empire is so evil: it shuts down certain shipments of fruit. Like The Clone Wars, Rebels has a super-strange problem: it’s a kid’s show that’s trying to deal with dark gritty stuff about government takeovers. If you were making an Indiana Jones cartoon and it featured Nazis, you probably wouldn’t show them killing people, but instead, knocking over fruit stands a lot, which is basically (other than enslaving Wookiees) the most evil thing the Empire appears capable of in this show.
Things finally get a little cool in “Rise of the Old Masters,” as the crew of the Ghost attempts to rescue Kanan’s old Jedi Master; Luminara Unduli. This serves double-duty as a Star Wars-conflict and a character conflict since Kanan is really hoping to pawn off Ezra as faux-Padawan to Master Unduli. The only problem is, she’s totally not alive at all and the bad guys used her spirit or body to lure the good guys into a trap. This introduces the Inquisitor into the mix, who is a hit-person for the Empire who also sports a lightsaber which he can make spin around all fancy. At this point we know nothing about the Inquisitor, but definitely count me among those who think he is a lame, phoned-in mash-up of Count Dooku and General Grievous. Seriously, why not just have Darth Vader? I mean, wasn’t it Darth Vader’s job to mop up the remaining Jedi?
The Darth Vader I know wouldn’t farm out the kill-the-rest-of-the-Jedi memo to some jerk with pointy teeth. Plus, Vader had a secret hit-man in the form of “Starkiller” in The Force Unleashed and the Emperor has Mara Jade at this point, right? Wait, neither of those count now, so that means Starkiller and Mara have been replaced by the far-less-interesting Inquisitor in the secret-hit-person department.
I get that the Sith like having secret apprentices, but even as that goes the Inquisitor isn’t really acting in secret (he wears the Imperial insignia on his outfit) and it just seems like he’s created so he can be an action figure. Again, having Darth Vader on this show in the role of the Inquisitor would make the show 100% better. Vader’s a real horse, the Inquisitor is the pony, but worse because there’s literally no reason for creating a new character who serves the same purpose as another but who is less cool.
Still, with the appearance of prequel-era badass Luminara Unduli (you remember when she fought like crazy in Attack of the Clones, right?) this episode was the best of the bunch so far.
The most recent episode is “Breaking Ranks,” and it is almost as boring as “Fighter Flight.” In fairness, this episode reminded me of a few episodes of season one of The Clone Wars, where there’s an unbelievable amount of focus on the Clones and how they feel about being in the war. Here, we see the training of Stormtroopers, which from the perspective of a big Star Wars fan is cool. Look! The Empire did stop using Clones! They started training regular people! Weird! Here, Ezra has infiltrated some small training academy of other teenage boys, and we learn that the training of Stormtroopers is almost as hardcore as the Empire’s big-bad-plans to knock over fruit stands on random planets. Again, this isn’t the show’s fault—we’re on the Disney Channel here—but if you’re worried about Stormtroopers being “ruined,” they certainly aren’t helped by this episode.
Still, with all that, I believe in Star Wars: Rebels. I think it might be setting up more fulfilling storylines that challenge the boundaries of what it appears to be: a kid’s show that creates Star Wars buzz through careful marketing. But, unlike other Star Wars tie-in-media of the past, Rebels has a weird obligation to do-no-harm to the rest of the franchise. It’s been placed on a canon pedestal superficially, which means its behaving the way any young thing would when thrust into the spotlight. It’s being careful. It’s playing it safe. It’s a cute little prancing pony.
These Rebels are part of Star Wars now, and they’re not ruining it at all. But—apart from rocking one inexplicable soul patch— they’re probably not going act-out any time soon and continue to be cute, adorable, and careful version of Star Wars. The only trouble is, we can’t wait for the real horse.
Ryan Britt is the author of Luke Skywalker Can’t Read: A New Geek Manifesto, forthcoming from Plume books in Fall 2015. His writing has appeared with The New York Times, The Awl, VICE, Tor.com and elsewhere.
