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I've often wondered why Tartakovsky's Star Wars: Clone Wars mini-series/pilot was deliberately excluded from Star Wars canon. While there are some minor continuity issues, as the Wikipedia page mentions, it's not that difficult to come up with ideas to patch up those problems in the story. Star Wars has often been a fairly evolving mythos, so it's not totally unprecedented.

Tartakovsky's Clone Wars was pretty sweet, but it was also ultra-violent, as Samurai Jack often was, which makes me wonder if Disney didn't like it.

Are there any official details about why it was excluded? Was there some single individual who made the call?

Or was it always the plan even from inception to exclude Clone Wars?

Star Wars: Clone Wars DVD cover

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    Maybe redundancy with the other one having a super similar name? They don’t sell this show on iTunes anymore. Jul 13, 2019 at 21:53

1 Answer 1

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Dave Filoni, showrunner of Star Wars: the Clone Wars discussed this in an interview. In short, the Jedi were wildly overpowered and the entire thing had such glaring canonical errors that it was easier to simply remove it from the official canon than try to explain why it was so different to the rest of the accepted stories.

Filoni: The way George explained it to me going in was that THE CLONE WARS micro-series was really an experiment to see what kind of audience there was for Star Wars in an animated form. There have been droids and Ewoks, but that was a long time ago. So he brought out THE CLONE WARS micro-series, and it was super action-packed and exciting and really short installments. And it proved that people wanted to see STAR WARS in a lot of different mediums. So when we into doing this, I think that, now that George is done with the prequels, he wanted to reestablish the rules a little bit more, like "Mace Windu can't take out hundreds of battle droids by himself, otherwise the arena on Geonosis would've been a wipeout; [The jedi] would've won, and there be no Clone Wars. Those are exciting installments, but we don't tie directly into them; we tie more directly into the film that preceded us, ATTACK OF THE CLONES, and the one that comes after us, REVENGE OF THE SITH. We take cues from [Tartakovsky's series]. I definitely pay a big homage to them in some of the design look of it. Anakin wears an outfit that was definitely inspired by what we saw in the other CLONE WARS. But there's no direct link-up.

Mr. Beaks Enlists in THE CLONE WARS with Director Dave Filoni!!

Tartakovsky himself was told that it was to "clean" the canon.

I think George is brilliant. And I think he just wants to ... I don't know the reasoning, exactly. But from any sense that I can make out of it, he just wants it to be clean. But there's so much fiction that's out with "Star Wars," I don't think it would matter."

Tartakovsky Talks About The State Of His SW: Clone Wars Micro-Series

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    Which wouldn't be so much of an issue if Lucas had had a better sense of scale to begin with and hadn't made all the armies too small. A hundred droids for each of the ten thousand Jedi in the galaxy would be 1 million, which is nothing compared to the tens of millions of soldiers in World War II on one planet, and is about one for every million of the trillion residents of Coruscant.
    – Adamant
    Jul 13, 2019 at 22:54
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    @Adamant - Scaling is a big problem in Star Wars. There's supposedly 25000 Star Destroyers in the galaxy and yet only 27 are present at the decisive battle against the Rebellion
    – Valorum
    Jul 13, 2019 at 22:57
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    I swear that George Lucas just took the total number of soldiers in WWII, turned them into clones and droids, and spread them out over about 10^(24) times the volume.
    – Adamant
    Jul 13, 2019 at 22:59
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    Yeah, there was that power gap General Grievous had
    – Machavity
    Jul 20, 2019 at 1:26

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