By: Dominic Jones
Simon Kinberg, executive producer of the upcoming Star Wars Rebels animated series coming to Disney XD this fall was recently interviewed about the series by Entertainment Weekly. Kinberg discussed many issues on, how he scored the job, the tone of the series, and hinted at some of the characters.
First off, Kinberg confirmed that the main characters will be new characters,
There’s a lot of new characters in the show. The prequels were centered around the origin of familiar characters, there’s a lot of new characters in this show. The main characters are new characters.
Kinberg addressed how he got the job,
They wanted to do an animated show and I loved [Cartoon Network's] Clone Wars and grew up with a lot of animated shows. So we just started to talk about where it would fall in the general Star Wars timeline. Really there was no predetermination going in. It could have been a prequel, sequel, a stand-alone universe. The main thing for us is how do we tell a story that enhances this universe, that answers questions that audiences may or may not have had but at least will make it feel like the world is fuller after watching the show. We pretty quickly got to this idea that though Rebel Alliance that was such an integral part of the movies, we know next to nothing about the formation of at least in terms of the movies and The Clone Wars. There was nothing in the canon that had delved deep into it. That’s where it started — let’s tell the story of the formation of the heroes in the original movies. And that put us in a time line between episode III and IV. You don’t want to be too close to New Hope so that it feels like it’s repetitive, you want to feel like you’re watching the earliest seeds of what will sprout into a full-blown rebellion.
When asked about the tone of the series Kinberg said,
You’re seeing the impact of the Empire, of stormtroopers around the galaxy, abusing and oppressing people. Thematically and politically, it goes to some dark places. But for the tone of the show we took our cues from the original movies, which had fun and adventure and swashbuckling with emotion and grounded human characters. We took all our cues from the original films. Obviously there are slight tonal differences between New Hope, Empire and Jedi. But I think the closest intended voice of the show is A New Hope. So there are places where we get into darker backstories, there are places we see how cruel and malevolent the Empire can be, but for the most part it’s a fun and character-driven story. Again taking our cues from the original films, it’s less maybe political than the prequels and more personal. It starts with a few character introductions that will precede the show. I wrote the first two episodes, they’re like a one-hour story across two episodes where we introduce the main characters in the show.
Kinberg also touched on the series villain, The Inquisitor,
That was probably the most daunting part of this process. George obviously created the best villain of our time. So we spent a lot of time brainstorming and working with the artists to come up with the Inquisitor. You’ve seen that image of him. We wanted somebody terrifying, a nightmare character for a kid but not somebody too foreign, too creature-ly. We didn’t want him to have a helmet for obvious reasons — the comparison [to Darth Vader]. We talked about a character who was cold and calculating and could tap into people’s emotional weaknesses as much as their physical weaknesses, and had a specific relationship to Jedi and the ways of the force. He would be somebody that the remaining Jedi would be especially scared of.
You can read the entire interview over at EW, where Kinberg discusses the differences between Rebels and The Clone Wars, discusses the influence of Lucasfilm’s Pablo Hidalgo, and drops some hints about the characters.
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