STAR WARS: THE CLONE WARS trailer and why I'm not at all crazy about it

For awhile I've been wondering: is it even accurate to refer to the six Star Wars movies as "Star Wars Episodes 1 through 6" anymore? I mean, the Star Wars saga is now way more than the story presented in George Lucas' original films, and Star Wars: The Clone Wars will only muddle the waters further. Perhaps Lucas should amend the titles of his movies to a scheme like "Star Wars: The Skywalker Cycle Episode I: The Phantom Menace". And doesn't "The Skywalker Cycle" have a nice operatic ring to it? Sorta like Wagner's Ring cycle.

Well anyway, here's the link to where you can watch the new trailer for The Clone Wars...

I must admit: for the first time in my life, I'm not jazzed at all about seeing a new Star Wars movie in the theaters (no doubt all of Chris Knight's friends will gasp in disbelief at reading that). To its credit, The Clone Wars looks amazing. But it seems too much like a waste of good technology. The Clone Wars is already the most extensively chronicled single period of Star Wars lore. I mean, this is three years of story time that we've seen documented over the past six years of real time by way of dozens of novels, comics, many video games, and Lord only knows what other media. And there was already a superb animated series devoted to it. Right now I'm feeling like if I were to go see The Clone Wars at the theater it would only be out of longstanding loyalty to Star Wars, not because I'm enthused about this movie itself.

Do we need the new The Clone Wars movie and computer-animated television series? I'm not sure that we do. Because if this kind of effort and financing is going to be poured into bringing to life new tales of the Star Wars saga (something which I'm not against at all) I would much rather it be spent toward showing us parts of it that we haven't seen before, or at most barely hinted at. Heck, the era of 4,000 years prior to the events of the movies that is portrayed by the Knights of the Old Republic video games would be absolutely fertile ground for developing the saga further. There is something like 25,000 years of Star Wars history that we know is there, and most of it is getting ignored. To focus on a narrow 40-50 year slice at the cost of everything else in this rich mythology is too big a waste of potential to just let it slide by unprotested.

I really hope that somewhere in Lucasfilm, that plans are on the table to further develop the Star Wars universe well beyond the confines of what we've come to expect of it. The Clone Wars could be an excellent test-bed for the technology that could keep this a viable franchise for many years to come. It would be a shame to let it go to waste just to keep milking a proven cash cow.