Season V

I just realized that it was just over a year ago that Disney announced that they had purchased LucasFilm and would immediately begin development of new Star Wars theatrical release live action movies.  With a release date about a year and a half in the future, they're no doubt full on into working on the movie, although little is known about the status thereof, including if anyone has been cast or not yet.  But, my interest in the franchise has been a bit keyed up as a result of that news.  It had previously been somewhat subdued due to... you probably guessed it... disappointment in the prequel trilogies and nothing really new or exciting to look forward to anyway with regards to Star Wars.

But that's not really exactly true.  I've had a lot of cool options to enjoy Star Wars over the last few years.  There's been some great video games out there.  The Clone Wars TV show has been a major hit, that has only gotten better season after season.  In fact, what I'm specifically posting about now is the fact that I finally got my hands (a few weeks late, but I've been busy) on Season V of the Clone Wars, the season that ended up being the last season.  There is new material out there that hasn't been released, but one of the details of the sale of LucasFilm to Disney, which isn't surprising if you saw what happened when Disney bought Marvel a few years earlier, was that they cancelled licensed TV shows out there and replaced them with new content on Disney-owned networks.  The Clone Wars, being a Cartoon Network show as it was, was therefore a prime target for cancellation, and the show that will replace it, Star Wars Rebels, will be on DisneyXD instead.  Based on some early shots or concepts, Rebels looks like it will look a lot like The Clone Wars, although presumably it will focus considerably less on the doings of Jedi, since it will take place after the Purge.

Although I'm just now picking up Season V, I watched some of it while it was actually airing--about 5-6 episodes or so.  I'm surprised right out of the gate to see that they've rearranged the order of some of the episodes.  "Revival", which kicked off the season, is moved back to air alongside the rest of the Darth Maul episodes.  In fact, they've grouped episodes together so that they've essentially converted, if you ignore the credits and opening sequences at the end of each episode, blocks of four episodes into almost Star Wars movies.  About 88 minutes each, so a little on the short side, but not completely outside the range of a feature length film.

In fact, they've done that all along (although not quite as drastically) through the show; several story arcs are 3-4 episodes long, making them effectively mini-movies, starting with the opening sequence that was actually converted into a theatrical release pilot of the show.  Looked at from that perspective, there aren't six Star Wars movies in existance right now, there are nearly thirty, depending on how you count them!

This current content, the promise of future content, and my current Star Wars game have conspired to make Star Wars stay near the top of my interests, and not cycle down from time to time, as all of my interests that I can't do anything about currently, will tend to do. 

With this, I'm almost ready to debut my Star Wars m20 wiki.  I need to massage the draft starship rules a bit, and I'd like to add a bit more setting detail, but otherwise, I'm ready to go.  And I'm rarin' to run something.  I'm excited to get back in the GM saddle after an extended run in the player's seat.  Right now, running Star Wars sounds at least as exciting as running my own DARK•HERITAGE setting... and that's saying something.