Clone Thoughts
I watched The Clone Wars over the weekend, and it's taken a few days for my thoughts to percolate.
Would've been nice to know Anikin was a damn basket case before the third movie. Would have made it all make a lot more sense. Note to George Lucas: perhaps putting essential character development in a cartoon that not everyone could watch even if they wanted to was a suboptimal choice?
I find it disturbing that the CW Padmé and Anikin have noticably more chemistry than their live-action counterparts, despite being literally two-dimensional. Which is not to say that either Portman or Christiansen did a bad job; in scenes with other actors (insofar as Portman had any) they were both fine. Even together they were both fine. They just didn't click, and the result completely gutted the relationship that Attack of the Clones needed to set up Revenge of the Sith. Anyway, in the cartoon you could actually believe they were in love, which was kind of nice.
Mace Windu and the Muppet totally kick ass. The "Hey Mean Joe, want a Coke?" moment was awfully cute, if slightly excessive.
I continue to be disturbed by the attitudes of meat people to droids in the SW universe. Padmé, one of the most sympathetic characters in the canon, sends C3PO out to get shot at as part of a ruse to reveal a steathed enemy...because he's a droid, apparently. This is the one bit of David Brin I tend to agree with.
Maybe Qui Gon could have kept Anikin from going bad, but once it was clear that Obi Wan couldn't they should have found the kid another teacher. The way they treated him made it obvious that the Jedi just didn't know how to deal with anyone who hadn't gotten into their system early enough. Anikin wasn't "too old to begin the training" any more than Luke was. But both of them were too old to have the proper Jedi attitudes inculcated. It's just that Luke had a bad example to avoid and a far healthier home life to fall back on.