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Star Wars has had a long history with animation stretching right back to the 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special, though it wasn’t until 2008 that the franchise really found its feet. Star Wars: The Clone Wars filled in the blanks between Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. Along the way, it created a bunch of fan-favorite characters (the most popular being Ahsoka Tano), expanded Obi-Wan and Anakin’s characters beyond what we saw in the movies, and went deep into Star Wars lore.
The only problem is that The Clone Wars had a famously rough start. Fan consensus is that you don’t need to see every episode to enjoy the show, with viewing guides recommending skipping many of the early episodes to get to the good stuff. This is perhaps why a poster on r/StarWars is weighing up ditching the show, as it doesn’t seem able to stack up to The Bad Batch:
Replies point out that The Bad Batch arrived more than a decade on from the first season of The Clone Wars and benefited from the huge technological and animation leaps made over the years. This makes comparing early The Clone Wars episodes to The Bad Batch unfair, as the more recent show is always going to look better.
However, even the more ardent fans have to admit it’s tough-going in season one. One says it took them three times to get through the first season, though the payoff in the final four-episode arc is:
“Some of the best I’ve seen in all of Star Wars and the last couple of minutes of the last episode portrays more emotion with less words than most more popular shows.”
Others confirm that “the further into it you go, the better it is”, especially when Anakin and Ahsoka begin to get some serious character development going on. Another common opinion is that the first two seasons of The Clone Wars were written with a child audience in mind whereas later ones recognized it had an older viewership and adjusted the maturity and complexity of the stories accordingly.
We have to agree. Some of those early The Clone Wars episodes are truly painful, but any misery is worth it for the thrills that come when it hits its stride later on. And while The Bad Batch is great, so far it can’t hold a candle to the epic moments that come in later seasons of The Clone Wars.
Star Wars: The Clone Wars is available to stream in full on Disney Plus.