No no no... Post Clone Wars is not a breakfast cereal. But that would be kind of awesome - a breakfast cereal where all of the pieces looked exactly the same! No odd-shaped ones or broken bits in the bottom of the box, because, you know... they'd be clones.

Ummm... right.

Where was I?

Oh right, Star Wars: The Clone Wars.

So, I used to blog about the show while it was on the air. Then Disney pulled the plug after season 5 without wrapping up the series properly - mainly because Clone Wars was running exclusively on Cartoon Network, which is owned by Warner Bros. Well... Disney can't have that, can they? Buncha jerks.

However, that wasn't quite the end. A good chunk of season 6 was completed, and released this year on Netflix. I won't go into every episode and recap everything, but suffice it to say if you have Netflix, it's well-worth checking out.

There were basically four main story lines:

• The first one revealed the origins of the Clone army, how Order 66 worked, and how close the Jedi actually came to discovering the plot. As with much of The Clone Wars, it really helped to fill in some of the plot points from the movies, and add some much-needed depth to them.
  
• The second one was about banking. Yay, banking. But it delved more into how the Emperor was manipulating everything behind the scenes. And also, we saw Anakin continue his slide towards the Dark Side.
  
• And then there was a story with Jar Jar. And his girlfriend, apparently. Yeccch. But as annoying as Jar Jar can be, the story itself dealt pretty heavily with some interesting elements of The Force™, which lead to...
  
• The final story, with Yoda going on a journey to learn more about The Force, including a pretty cool visit to Dagaboh. Some stuff from the movies gets explained in here as well - such as why some Jedi disappeared when they died, and some didn't. Some of it is pretty far out there, but still cool to watch.
  

There's also a set of four story reels on StarWars.com of more unfinished episodes, although I haven't watched them yet. And finally, there were another two stories written - one about Darth Maul which was turned into a comic book, and another which will be released as a novel at some point.

Despite this, the Clone Wars did come to an end without really bringing us up to SW: Episode III (although you could tell by the shift in the mood of the series and Anakin's growing conflicts that they must have been getting close), or resolving some of the character arcs like whatever happened to Ahsoka and so on. In the end, The Clone Wars was a really good series. It expanded the Star Wars universe, filled in some gaps, and was more often then not pretty entertaining stuff.

But now... there's Star Wars Rebels.

Airing on Disney XD (take that Warner Bros.), this series picks up between Episodes III and IV (seemingly closer to IV) with a group of new characters and the beginnings of the rebellion against the Empire. I've watched the first five episodes and so far it's quite good. Like The Clone Wars, it has a young lead character to bring a young viewing audience into the series. But also like The Clone Wars, it doesn't becoming cloying or annoying. The character (Ezra) borrows pretty heavily from Disney's Aladdin, but that's not so much a bad thing (at least he doesn't sing). The tone is generally lighter than The Clone Wars, but then, the Clone Wars are over, and have apparently been for some years. They seem to be trying to strike a mood more in keeping with the original trilogy, rather than the prequels. Although the war is over, there's still fighting going on, and there's still death that happens, so it doesn't treat the rebellion or the oppression of the Empire lightly, but there's a good mix of humor in the show, and the characters they've created seem pretty well thought-out. Two of the lead characters are strong, smart females, which is a plus, since Star Wars has always been a pretty male-dominated universe. It's encouraging to see them continue with that same spirit that Ahsoka brought to The Clone Wars.

If I had any disappointment with it so far, is that they've created yet another lightsaber-weilding villain specifically for the show. Look... why not just have Vader in there doing his own dirty work? Isn't he supposed to be hunting down and destroying the Jedi around this time? Squashing the rebels would seem to be in his job description, too. Not that The Inquisitor is a bad character, but he just seems too derivative and frankly, unnecessary.

The visual style is a bit different than the Clone Wars. Gone is some of the painterly look of the textures, and the animation seems more refined, but that should happen anyway as studios get more adept at producing CG animation for TV. Some of the inspiration for the look of the show came from Ralph McQuarrie's concept paintings for the original trilogy, and you can definitely see that here and there (one of the characters is based on Ralph's original concept for Chewbacca). The visuals are first-rate, and pretty amazing for what amounts to a half-hour cartoon show. Kids are so spoiled these days.

I'm not going to recap the series like I did for The Clone Wars, but I'm definitely going to watch it. Hopefully they'll continue to make fun, interesting, and compelling new Star Wars stories. What with J.J. Abrams directing Episode VII, someone has to. Am I right?

Hopefully though, some day, when they eventually end this series, how about a proper wrap-up next time, 'kay?