Forget Darth Vader. This is the 'Rogue One' character that has Star Wars fans buzzing
Since 2008, the Star Wars galaxy has been caught between two separate entertainment spheres: the live action world of the movies, and the animated world of Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels.
Characters have crossed over from live action to the cartoons -- witness Anakin Skywalker, a hero in Clone Wars, and his alter ego Darth Vader, the villain of Rebels -- but never the other way around.
At least, not until now. News has emerged that Forest Whitaker's character in the upcoming Star Wars movie, Rogue One, started life as a Clone Wars character -- and George Lucas himself had plans for the character's live-action future all along.
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Ostensibly, the headline on Wednesday's big Rogue One reveal by EW was that Darth Vader will appear in the movie. Which, for most Star Wars fans, was as obvious as saying there's sand on Tatooine.
The movie is about a group of Rebels stealing the plans to the Death Star. We have been told it ends "ten minutes before" the events of Episode IV, aka the original Star Wars.
You think it's not going to include the franchise's most popular character who just happens to be hot on the trail of those plans as Star Wars begins?
No, Saw Gerrera is the far more interesting reveal. From the trailer, we knew Whitaker's character was a veteran warrior of some sort. "If you continue to fight," he asks the heroine Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), "what will you become?"
It's a poignant question. When we met Gerrera as a young man in Clone Wars, he was a newly-minted rebel leader on the planet Onderon, fighting Count Dooku's Seperatists. He and his sister Steela were militarized by the Jedi Council; Anakin Skywalker himself supplied them with illegal rocket launchers via a smuggler acquaintance.
It's worth catching the whole story on Netflix -- it's Clone Wars Season 5 (when the animation got really good), episodes 2 through 5. But if you want the spoilers, here you go: the Gerreras win back Onderon at great cost. Steela loses her life. We last see him turning from the victory celebrations in disgust.
Pablo Hidalgo of Lucasfilm's Story Group -- which was created in part to help spin fan-pleasing, connecting threads between properties just like this -- then dropped some further details.
It turns out Lucasfilm's former owner first conceived Gerrera as a character in his aborted, too-expensive-for-TV live-action series, "Star Wars Underworld." Only then did Lucas insert Gerrera in Clone Wars to provide his backstory.
After his appearance in the show, as the Galactic Empire emerged from the ashes of the Republic, Gerrera became an important Rebel radical:
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In other words, respectable Rebels refused to recognize him.
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Indeed, there may even be an analogy here to how the CIA's funding of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s inadvertently led to Al Qaeda in the 1990s.
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As mainstream pop culture tilts more and more towards the geeky -- see also Game of Thrones -- giving supporting characters a richer backstory is clearly one way to surprise and delight hardcore fans.
And in this battle, Lucasfilm has long been ahead of the curve.
As has one fan who apparently predicted the reveal a month ago:
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Topics Star Wars
Chris is a veteran tech, entertainment and culture journalist, author of 'How Star Wars Conquered the Universe,' and co-host of the Doctor Who podcast 'Pull to Open.' Hailing from the U.K., Chris got his start as a sub editor on national newspapers. He moved to the U.S. in 1996, and became senior news writer for Time.com a year later. In 2000, he was named San Francisco bureau chief for Time magazine. He has served as senior editor for Business 2.0, and West Coast editor for Fortune Small Business and Fast Company. Chris is a graduate of Merton College, Oxford and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He is also a long-time volunteer at 826 Valencia, the nationwide after-school program co-founded by author Dave Eggers. His book on the history of Star Wars is an international bestseller and has been translated into 11 languages.
