droids

As an old-school Star Wars fan, I've been a little disenchanted with the many little ways George Lucas has slowly turned his rich tapestry into a children's fable. In the Star Wars I loved, there were moments of real terror, a sinister menace and true danger. The "Ooh, we can sell toys!" started with the ewoks and hit critical mass with Jar-Jar Binks.

But there were some moves in the right direction. Episodes II and III were improvements over The Phantom Menace, so I held out hope that new projects might keep what I felt was the proper maturity of Star Wars in perspective. And so, like a good little drone, I tuned into Cartoon Network's The Clone Wars animated series, and it was ... cute.

For years and years, this was the era we knew so little about. In the novels and comics, which took all of this pretty seriously, thank you very much, we covered from thousands of years before Darth Vader to spans after Han and Leia get married. But not the Clone Wars. That era was special. So we waited. And we got cute.