Cad Bane wasn’t the only star of The Clone Wars Season 2 Press Junket at Big Rock Ranch. After all, the show is called The CLONE Wars.
Here’s a selection of our fave photos of the clone troopers in action as they mingle with the press, guard the entrance and play as themselves in games from LucasArts.
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Tags: Clone Wars: Season 2, Costumes, The 501st Legion
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Reporting about Season Two of The Clone Wars is exciting and fun, but that also means a lot of hungry reporters need to be fed before they can all demo LucasArts games, chat with cast and crew, and get their photos taken with Cad Bane!
Leave it to the creative Lucasfilm Animation chefs at Big Rock Ranch to not only make tasty Gungan and roast Bantha sandwiches, Palpatine pizzas, and Wookiee cookies, but they also showed off their artistic decorating skills with fancy Cad Bane cookies complete with evil red glittery eyes. Who knew bounty hunters tasted so good?
Here’s a selection of photos directly from the food line. Nom Nom Nom!
9 Comments » | Tags: Clone Wars: Season 2, Food
Events, The Clone Wars | Permalink
Photos: Jocelyn Knight
Note: Stay tuned to the Official Star Wars Blog today as we update with news straight from Lucasfilm’s Big Rock Ranch where the Clone Wars Season Two press junket is currently underway…
This morning, members of the press were given a sneak peek at a three-episode story arc from season two that returns the Republic heroes to the planet of Geonosis introduced in Attack of the Clones. Without revealing any plot points, we can report what supervising director Dave Filoni said upon introducing the episodes:
Filoni: “Across this series of episodes we’ll see Anakin’s relationship with his Padawan, which is something I’m very keenly interested in developing as the series moves forward. Ahsoka’s one of the big question marks, especially if you’ve been a fan of Star Wars for a long time. Originally people said ‘I didn’t know Anakin had a Padawan’, and so we dealt with that question last year. Now the impression is, ‘Dave, where are you going with this and what’s going to happen to this girl?’ The kids that I run into all the time are very concerned for Ahsoka, because she’s not in the third movie — ‘and why is that Dave?’ We’ll find out. I’m very well aware of what the answer to that is.”
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Events, News, The Clone Wars | Permalink
Lucasfilm’s Big Rock Ranch is hosting the Clone Wars Season Two press junket today, and the Star Wars galaxy’s new blue-skinned baddie Cad Bane dropped in for a few photo-ops with the press (that’s him posed with a few clones and Obi-Wan voice actor James Arnold Taylor above). We’re posting a few shots of the costume here for any ambitious costumers hoping to Bane it up for Halloween this year. Thanks to Jocelyn Knight for the photos!
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Wired magazine has chatted with everyone from Bill Gates to the Maker himself George Lucas, so they never shy away from intimidating interview subjects. So it shouldn’t surprise fans that they would go a step further and interview bounty hunter Cad Bane from The Clone Wars.
Wired reports:
Unless you’ve got a pile of money to throw at him, you’ll have no luck hiring Bane. And he’s no easier to get hold of for a simple interview. But Wired.com managed to do so without getting gunned down by his dual blasters. In fact, he was in a less-deadly mood than usual due to good business coming his way during the long galactic conflict.
“I don’t suffer fools easily, so I prefer to work alone. People in my line of work don’t care much for socializing. Sometimes the job demands that I work with specialists, and that’s when other folks come in handy. But make no mistake: I call the shots.”
Bane has no personal recollections of the late Jango Fett, but he confesses that the Republic’s clone armies, generated from Fett’s genetic code, have given him “no end of trouble.” He hears rumors of Fett’s son (Boba) perhaps taking up his father’s business, but he’s not concerned.
“I don’t have time to keep track of every little whelp in the galaxy,” Bane said. “I’m the best there is. If he doesn’t get into my business, I won’t get into his. I’d be happy to track him down — but it’ll cost you. I don’t work for free.”
Read the full interview here:
Bounty Hunter Cad Bane Brings Pain in Season 2 of Clone Wars
(Wired.com)
108 Comments » | Tags: Cad Bane, Clone Wars: Season 2, Interviews, Wired
In Pop Culture, The Clone Wars | Permalink
We’ve reported before about the awesome Star Wars references in the Venture Bros. animated series on Adult Swim. However, our blogger friends over at io9.com take the idea even further and ponder the idea of how much more different The Clone Wars and Venture Bros. would be if their writing staffs switched shows!
What would happen if you turned the Lucasfilm writers loose on the Venture Bros., and let the Venture staff have a crack at The Clone Wars?
The main difference between these shows, says io9 writer Graeme McMillan, is that the Venture Bros. writers are deeply bitter whereas The Clone Wars‘ writers are, at their heart, very sincere.
So maybe if the Venture Bros. writers got to take a turn writing The Clone Wars, you’d immediately have more weird pop-culture humor. But you’d also get more investigation into the bitterness that’s just under the surface of the Star Wars universe — the fact that Anakin is a jerk who’s destined to become the scourge of the galaxy.
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In Pop Culture, The Clone Wars | Permalink
Ready to have your mind blown by a Jedi playing a lightsaber GUITAR!? Check out this music video made by the folks over at Cartoon Network to help get you in the mood for the next season of The Clone Wars.
WATCH VIDEO: Jedi Song
Here’s some of our favorite screengrabs from the music video:
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The Clone Wars | Permalink
(L to R: Tom Kane, Dee Bradley Baker, James Arnold Taylor, Dave Filoni)
At San Diego Comic-Con International, Lucasfilm Director of Fan Relations Steve Sansweet chats with Star Wars: The Clone Wars voice actors James Arnold Taylor (Obi-Wan Kenobi and Plo Koon), Dee Bradley Baker (all the clone troopers), and Tom Kane (Yoda, Clone Wars announcer) — as well as supervising director Dave Filoni — about their process, character building and why it’s so much to act like more than two characters at once. The cast also talks a little about their support of the original voice cast of Futurama reprising their roles during salary disputes.
How important is it to cast the right voice for an animated series?
Dave Filoni: At the end of the day we need actors to bring the characters to life with dimension and emotion. We’re not trying to mimic previous actors, but instead take nice notes of things from Ewan McGregor or Alec Guinness, but ultimately you have to be Obi-Wan Kenobi. For Dee with the clones, he had to invent how you do that kind of role and not just mimic a certain sound or tone.
What’s harder to do — voicing an established character like Obi-Wan Kenobi or coming up with a voice for a character that’s never spoken before like Plo Koon?
James Arnold Taylor: Well, there’s more pressure because you’re doing Ewan McGregor and Alec Guinness and you combine them both and hopefully get something that the fans like. And if I’m doing it right, you’re not hearing me, or Ewan or Alec, you’re hearing Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Plo Koon was great though because it’s Dave Filoni’s favorite, and he was great to do the voice for. And I have to give Matt Wood a lot of credit too because he takes it and turns it into this whole other thing. There’s also more freedom in playing Plo Koon.
Dee, your clone voices are all alike and yet they’re not alike. You have to come up with individual personalities. An excellent example of this is in the season one episode “Rookies.” How do you make all of these characters seem different?
Dee Bradley Baker: It was very important for us to try and maintain distinct personalities and feel for each of the clones — which is something we try to do in all of the episodes. So we recorded each of the clones, straight through on their own — giving them different status, different ages, personality quirks. Giving them slight adjustments from the basic voice — a little younger, or a little gruffer. Then when you piece them all together they feel like they are distinct humans — which adds humanity to these heroic soldiers.
James Arnold Taylor: I always wonder if the clones sit around and do imitations of each other. Or have them talk to each others’ girlfriends. (laughs)
9 Comments » | Tags: Celebrities, Comic-Con, Dave Filoni, SDCC 2009
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Over the scope of 22 episodes plus a feature film, The Clone Wars series has visually expanded the scope of the Star Wars galaxy immensely. We’ve gone to about 20 planets in the whirlwind that was the first season, and met a variety of alien cultures and creatures. Season two promises to be even richer, and Comic-Con International hosted some of the key members of the artistic team that help put that together at a panel early on Star Wars Day. On hand were Dave Filoni, Supervising Director; Joel Aron, CG Supervisor; Kilian Plunkett, Lead Designer; Danny Keller, Story Artist and Animation Consultant; and moderating the panel was StarWars.com’s own Pablo Hidalgo
“The goal was to create 22 minutes of the best movie to you each and every week,” said Filoni, describing how creator George Lucas kept pushing the envelope on the scope of the story. “If there are 10 clones on the screen, he wants 20. We put 20, he wants 100. Once we get around 100, he wants a thousand. It’s a goal that you simply don’t see every week on an animated series.”
Filoni contrasted the leaps and bounds made by the production team. When the feature film and season one began, Lucasfilm Animation was still being constructed from the ground up. “One simple way to illustrate it very easily, we had Plo Koon — a new character we had built for that. We had three clones that we redressed with different formats. That was largely all we had to build for that episode. No, for the season finale, we had new models of Cad Bane, Aurra Sing, Robonino, a modified pirate for a bounty hunter, a whole bunch of new Senators and background characters. So, just as far as character models, we’ve multiplied what we’re capable of.”
Pablo chimed in – “With that said, is there any temptation to revisit any of the designs done for season one?”
“It’s unavoidable,” said Filoni. “Just because we built Anakin Skywalker, he’s was the first model we built, so he’s needed some of the heaviest redesign that we’ve had to do. The Anakin you see now in Clone Wars, even though he looks relatively the same, is not the same model we used in the movie. In fact, he’s substantially better than the one. We redid the rigs, we redid some of the surface textures.”
To show an example of how confidence in execution has changed the approach of designing the characters, Kilian showed an image of the original concept maquette of Anakin Skywalker next to the concept maquette for Bail Organa. Whereas the original explorations of Anakin were hard and geometric, Organa was a much more subtle yet still stylized design.
12 Comments » | Tags: Comic-Con, Dave Filoni, Pablo Hidalgo, SDCC 2009
Events, The Clone Wars | Permalink
Nothing is worse than being struck down during the summer by a dreaded cold or the flu. Sadly, quite a few of us at Lucas Online (including myself!) are suffering through a rather vicious virus — personally I think it’s Balmorra Flu. Then again, I should be counting my lucky Death Stars that I don’t have Crazed Bantha Fever!
So now is the perfect time to look back at some of the viruses, flu bugs (in some cases actual insects) and other diseases that have attacked various Star Wars characters.
Blue Shadow Virus
The infamous Blue Shadow Virus, a deadly plague wiped from the galaxy generations ago, comes back as a very real threat by the hand of mad scientist Dr. Nuvo Vindi, during The Clone Wars. Vindi has cultivated it once more. Furthermore, he has created an airborne version of the virus — no longer is it contained only to water. Placed within bombs, the gaseous virus is now an incredibly potent weapon. In the attempt to thwart Vindi, Amidala and Ahsoka, as well as a few clone troopers, are infected with the deadly virus, leaving it up to the Jedi to track down the cure in the form of a rare plant root.Krytos virus
Once it infected a host, the virus destroyed the infected host body cell by cell until the victim’s flesh fell apart completely, resulting in an agonizing death. Highly contagious, the Krytos virus was designed to both target only non-Human populations and be treated by large amounts of bacta. The virus was transmitted by physical contact or through a water supply, but could not spread by airborne transmission. The plague was eventually eradicated by the Vratix, a bacta-producing insectoid species from Thyferra, who combined bacta and ryll kor to develop rylca, the most effective medicine against the disease.Kaminoan nano-virus
The Kaminoan Nano-Virus was a Nanogene virus created by a Separatist-aligned Kaminoan to kill all clone troopers. It was discovered by the Jedi Kit Fisto and Aayla Secura a few months after the Battle of Geonosis, who were staying at Kamino when they passed a squad of dead troops. After confirming a deadly virus, Prime Minister Lama Su issued Master Cloner Sayn Ta to create a vaccine to protect all clonesGobindi virus
The Gobindi virus was first discovered by the ancient Gobindi, who were utterly wiped out from its spreading. The Gobindi discovered a cure, but failed to administer it quickly enough to survive. Thriving in hot and humid environments, the virus required a liquid medium to move from one host to another, thus remaining mildly contagious at best. Imperial scientists discovered a way to allow the virus to move through the air and developed it into a biological weapon. The virus itself resembled a tiny, horned eel that wrapped its host in a coating of green slime to maintain its environment. Covered in the slime, the host could continue to move about, spreading the virus. The Empire’s plan to use the virus as a weapon was ultimately foiled.
Check out more illnesses in this handy and sickly index on Wookieepedia: Diseases and Maladies in Star Wars
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The Clone Wars | Permalink
