You think you know someone and then they just… wow.
All right, in case - like me - you were not aware of this happening or maybe you were a little bit aware and kinda sorta blanked on it… Dave Filoni created a half dozen short Star Wars animations.
Filoni is the guiding light of The Mandalorian, but maybe more importantly - depending on how flexible you are about watching animation - has been up to his eyeballs in Clone Wars and Rebels, both of which are to my mind pretty amazing explorations of the Star Wars universe and both of which waaaaaay over-deliver in terms of sophistication and narrative heft.
And now there are these… I don’t honestly know what to call them. Or it. I feel like Tales of the Jedi is definitely a concept album. These bloody amazing, brutally affecting ten-to-fifteen-minute gutpunches.
Are you KIDDING ME? These stories make the rest of us look bad. Working - as in Mandalorian - with basic single idea narratives, Tales of the Jedi just about flattened me. Three Ahsoka stories and three, somewhat more surprisingly, about a stiff, serious Jedi master whose name I won’t let slip in case that’s a spoiler, but whose narrative has been broadly unexplored in the movies and even the existing TV shows… And then Ep 6… dear god, Filoni, are you trying to break me? The sheer confidence to run a structure like that… damn.
These are stories from before it all starts to go right, and they are dark, compromised and nuanced. They’re Hail Mary passes, missed connections, beginnings and ironies. I will not be showing these to my Rebels-addicted kids, because I don’t need my nine year old wearing a Sartre x Jedi Code edition just yet. (More importantly, he would be sad.) I will however be telling Mrs H watch them all on her journey back to the UK tomorrow.
Bloody hell. Honour is due.
I watched them a few days ago and it's true they are all pretty rad. Weirdly, I think I appreciated the non-Ahsoka episodes more just because (as you mentioned) the others explore a facet that has gotten almost no attention as far as I know -- though I am a few books behind I think.
To that end, if Episode 6 was good for you, I can recommend the Ahsoka Novel with a full endorsement. Being a novel it obviously is a bit less tight, but it was definitely an experience to watch that episode knowing a bit more about the first incarnations of those characters
It made me want more Dooku backstory.