Disney is remaking the best bits of Star Wars as animated web shorts to lure in the kids
The Star Wars films are frequently described—sometimes with dismissiveness, but often with genuine love—as kids’ movies, attempts to translate the archaic adventure serials of George Lucas’ youth into a series of big-budget sci-fi action spectaculars (while also managing to spawn one of the largest entertainment empires on the planet, which, ya know, bonus). But as many hopeful geek parents have learned to their sorrow over the years, getting a kid hooked on Star Wars—which now clocks in at a whopping 18 hours of trade negotiations, be-handings, and old-timey British actors mumbling about the Senate, even if we only take the main series movies into account—isn’t necessarily as easy as it sounds.
Luckily Disney is here, as always, to help with your youthful indoctrination needs. The company announced today that it’ll soon be launching Star Wars Galaxy Of Adventures, a new series of animated web shorts designed to familiarize kids with the most pivotal—i.e., badass—parts of the Star Wars universe. The series will launch with a packet of six shorts—apparently covering stuff like the Death Star trench run, the Jedi sand barge escape, and (ugh) Yoda’s bouncy fun time duel with Count Dooku from Attack Of The Clones—that’ll land on the Star Wars Kids YouTube channel, and will continue weekly until the release of Episode IX in December 2019, once the company has gotten your helpless children well and truly hooked.
The upshot, at least, is that the animation is pretty sweet, done in a style that mashes together anime influences and a rougher, more painterly look. Plus, it allows some of the series’ most iconic moments—Luke lighting up his father’s saber for the first time, Vader threatening that poor rebel dude at the start of A New Hope—to get a little extra flourish, courtesy of the animated medium, which is either pretty cool, or an unforgivable violation of your precious, fragile childhood, depending on where your personal nostalgia meter pings. (It sounds like they’re using the original dialogue tracks from the films, at least.)