LucasfilmDisney Just Announced A New ‘Star Wars’ Animated Series
Lucasfilm‘Star Wars: Resistance’
Fresh off the presses, Disney Channel has just announced their next Star Wars animated series. Production has begun on the anime-inspired Star Wars: Resistance, which is Disney’s follow-up to the just-completed (after a robust four-season run) Star Wars: Rebels. While that Disney XD toon centered upon a band or scrappy rebels who eventually became a part of the Rebellion just before the events of A New Hope, this time around it’ll be… well, essentially the same idea.
This show will deal with the events leading up to The Force Awakens. The show will be about Kazuda Xiono, a young pilot recruited to spy on the growing First Order. It’s allegedly inspired by creator Dave Filoni’s (The Clone Wars and Rebels) interest in World War II aircraft and fighter pilots. That’s fitting enough as the original Star Wars and its climatic Death Star run was inspired by World War II aerial dogfights.
Oh, and it’ll feature occasional appearances by Poe Dameron (voiced by Oscar Isaac), Captain Phasma (voiced by Gwendoline Christie). Oh (again), BB-8 will be heavily involved as well. Like Star Wars Rebels and Star Wars: The Clone Wars (both of which were excellent and enriched the Star Wars movies), Resistance will essentially tell stories in between major movies, offering untold looks at before/after famous events in the Star Wars universe.
That was arguably the point of the Star Wars Story film spinoffs, even if they got sidetracked. We’ll see if we get any Star Wars Story movies after the tortured productions of Rogue One and Solo, but I was always hopeful that we’d get more like the former and less like the latter. But if it’s up to the animated shows (or the live-action show) to offer a different look at Star Wars, so be it.
The plan for Disney was presumably to do somewhat short-lived Star Wars animated shows that would end right as the target demographic was aging out, with the hope that the next generation of kids would hop on board for the next iteration. That makes sense, as it’s the periodic re-juicing of the property that has kept the likes of Scooby Doo and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles relatively healthy on the regular. So, this announcement is not remotely a surprise.
For the record, the show was created by Dave Filoni, executive-produced by Athena Portillo, Justin Ridge) and Brandon Auman and art-directed by Amy Beth Christenson. The voice cast will include Christopher Sean, Suzie McGrath, Scott Lawrence, Myrna Velasco, Josh Brener, Donald Faison, Bobby Moynihan, Jim Rash and Rachel Butera.