Star Wars: The Clone Wars - Season 1

The first twenty two episode chunk of Lucasarts' continuing struggle to milk the Star Wars name for all its worth is considerably better than the film that preceded it, which isn't saying very much at all. Still, as a weekly, quickly-digested dose of competent action, it's pretty decent. It's still peppered with annoyances, but their relative infrequency and the plot working better to push twenty minutes instead of a whole movie make it much more tolerable. The droids are still dorky and not funny, but they're not making asses of themselves at every available opportunity, and Ziro the Worst Idea Ever is limited to a couple minutes in an otherwise decent finale instead of being a major villain throughout, although that could be a problem for next season. They also managed a way to make Jar Jar Binks even worse, after I had nearly come to terms with his idiocy - make his character model ugly as sin, replace his actual voice actor partway through the season with an even worse imitator, and make his bumbling, unfunny antics the linchpin of several episodes' stories. Impressive.

I could keep going with mistakes and screw-ups, and probably will, I just want to make it clear that unlike the movie, I mostly enjoyed or at least tolerated the series. Star Wars is still an interesting setting to me, so even if what's actually happening is silly or doesn't really make sense, I can usually handle it. The show is more aimed at kids anyway, even though they're going to start airing these episodes on Adult Swim soon. Each episode tries to have a moral, which can be grating but fine enough, and there are some multi-episode story arcs that are often pretty decent. There's some inconsistency in the art and animation, with some characters and even entire episodes looking kinda bad, though they're getting the hang of doing a decent light saber duel at least. I'm really not a big fan of the art style, although by this point I've gotten used to it. Only children and big Star Wars fans need apply, but it's not terrible.