Clone Wars season six

The Clone Wars finally coming to Netflix, with thirteen all new, never before seen episodes is great news for Star Wars fans (and I certainly count myself as one of those.)  I've had the series on DVD, so this is actually the best I've ever seen them; in HD, on my bigger TV with the better stereo.  And what better way to kick that off than with all new episodes?

Unfortunately, I had a busy weekend, so I only got to see the first story arc--of four episodes.  I think it's probably not much of a spoiler to say that "protocol 66"--the engineered programing in all of the clone's mind that enables Order 66; the Jedi extermination order, remains undiscovered by the Jedi.  Revenge of the Sith would have had a hard time playing out as it did otherwise.

But it's interesting to see how this show has gotten progressively darker as the seasons have progressed.  Sure, there's still some silly Jar Jar episodes, or whimsical droid episodes, but we're also diving into pretty deep stuff, and pretty dark stuff, as the series led up to Revenge of the Sith.  It was originally the intention of the show's creators that the end of the series would dovetail perfectly into that movie, but because of the business reality of Disney's purchase of Lucasfilm, and their not surprising desire to get out of airing shows on a competitor's network (The Cartoon Network, in this case) it's tragic yet unsurprising to see that that goal remains incompletely fulfilled.  A similar thing happened to the great Marvel shows that were on at the time; the Avengers show, the Spectactular Spider-man show, etc. all moving aside to make room for DisneyXD shows with similar characters.

Luckily, however, Disney is fully onboard with the Netflix business model, and is putting stuff on Netflix fairly quickly.  And luckily, some of the replacement shows are pretty good.  I was initially quite sceptical of Spider-man and his Ultimate Friends; my somewhat tongue-in-cheek nostalgic nickname for the current show, but I have to admit that it's grown on me a bit, and it's not a bad show at all.  I have similar hopes that Star Wars Rebels will be as good as The Clone Wars was... but it won't be the Clone Wars, and that's a bit of a shame, really.