Star Wars Rebels

About

Star Wars Rebels^[1] is an American animated CGI television series set in the Star Wars universe. The series is set in the time between Episode 3 and Episode 4, approximately 5 years before A New Hope. The series follows a small band of rebel fighters, including two Jedi, as they struggle to fight against the Imperial presence on the backwater planet of Lothal. The series also focuses on the origins of the much larger Rebel Alliance. The series gained instant notoriety when it was announced that James Earl Jones would reprise his role as Darth Vader for the first time since Revenge of the Sith in 2005. ^[2]

History

After Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm and Star Wars, the Cartoon Network series, Lucasfilm announced that they would begin “winding down” the Star Wars The Clone Wars series, and subsequently announced that the series would be cancelled. ^[3] Following this, Lucasfilm announced that a new series would be produced titled Star Wars Rebels. ^[4] When talking about the inspiration for the series, and it’s differences to The Clones Wars, executive producer Simon Kinberg said: ^[5]

We pretty quickly got to this idea that though Rebel Alliance that was such an integral part of the movies, we know next to nothing about the formation of at least in terms of the movies and The Clone Wars. There was nothing in the canon that had delved deep into it. That’s where it started – let’s tell the story of the formation of the heroes in the original movies.

The place we went back to as to a visual template was Ralph McQuarrie, who was one of the original concept artists for the original Star Wars films. His art is softer, a little more figurative, more of a feel of being drawn, less computer generated. The first few movies had a bit of a hand-made quality. We wanted the show to have that. There’s also in the archives where [creator George] Lucas keeps all the original art and props, there’s tons of art that’s McQuarrie’s musing on the Star Wars universe that was never used in the films.

Online Relevance

Star Wars Rebels has a sizable following online, both within and outside of the larger Star Wars fandom. On Tumblr there a numerous posts tagged under the series, ^[6]^[7]^[8] as well as specific blogs dedicated to the series. ^[9]^[10] On Reddit there is a dedicated subreddit that has near 4,000 readers. ^[11]

On YouTube the official trailers for both seasons have over 3.5 and 1.8 million views respectively (both shown below).

Several parodies have been made of Star Wars Rebels by other companies that have ties to Lucasfilm and Disney. On October 4, 2014 the BTV uploaded a video from Angry Birds which was promoting their new Rebels themed levels (shown below, left). As of July 2015 the video has over 1.5 million views. On December 4, 2014 Lego made a parody of Rebels (shown below, right). As of July 2015 the video has over 1.5 million views.