Tales of the Jedi’s mysterious arrival on the schedule of Star Wars Celebrations had fans all over speculating what the animated series could be. Now, as producer Dave Filoni revealed at the convention, we know it’s far from what people were expecting. And yet, still kind of a surprise.
Revealed during Star Wars Celebration Anaheim, Tales will be a six-part short animated series developed by Filoni with Lucasfilm animation, and co-written in part with The Clone Wars scribe Charles Murray. The series is just six episodes long, split into two, three-episode anthologies: one that follows Ahsoka Tano across various points of her life, from her birth to her exploits after the rise of the Empire and perhaps beyond, while the other will depict a young Count Dooku, master to Padawan Qui-Gon Jinn (played in part by both a returning Liam Neeson, as well as Neeson’s son), before his exit from the Jedi Order and his fall to the Dark side.
In a trailer released to fans at Celebration, footage from the series included glimpses of a post-Revenge of the Sith galaxy, including glimpses of Padmé Amidala’s funeral on Naboo, and Bail Organa looking grim. Footage intercut sequences from both the Dooku and Ahsoka halves of the show: a younger Dooku igniting his blue lightsaber, and standing in front of the ancient tree at the heart of the Jedi Temple, and then cutting to him intervening in a tense standoff between villagers and armed guards (with massive, conical helmets) on a greyish planet, with lots of architecture evocative of bombed out towns in the First and Second World Wars. We also see Dooku and Mace Windu — looking very similar to his Clone Wars self — fighting droids in an autumnal forest, as Dooku gets increasingly aggressive, threatening the droid’s human leader before Mace intervenes and tells him to stand down. That’s not the only aggression from the future Darth Tyranus, either: we also see the young Qui-Gon Jinn, having ignited his own lightsaber alongside his master, get forced pushed aside into a building in the same village as glimpsed earlier, thrust away by Dooku.
In the Ahsoka footage meanwhile, we see glimpses of the future Padawan as a baby, as a Togruta village elder declares “Jedi. Ahsoka is Jedi.” We see moments of a baby Ahsoka being carried strapped to the front of her mother’s (a character confirmed to be played by Star Wars: Battlefront II’s Janina Gavankar during the panel) chest in forests, blaster in her mother’s hand. We also glimpse an older Ahsoka, this time a youngling, as she trains in lightsaber practice against remote droids, and eventually Clone Troopers firing stun blast rounds, with Anakin (the returning Matt Lanter) and other Jedi and clones watching in the background. Anakin repeatedly says “again!” as Ahsoka lets shots slip past and stun her to the floor.
“I’m tired of fighting,” Ahsoka tells her master, as we cut to shots of a traditional Jedi funeral attended by various Jedi — including a glimpse of Yaddle, although it was hard to say if this shot of Yaddle was from another scene. More intriguing shots from the trailer concluded with Ahsoka, wearing something similar to her slacks from the penultimate episodes of Clone Wars season 7, standing in a village engulfed in flames — over a seemingly wounded person, and behind them, an Imperial Inquisitor, their red-dual blade weapon ignited.
Star Wars: Tales of the Jedi will stream on Disney+ this Spring.
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