“It was a youngling! You son of a bitch!“

Ended, the Clone Wars have. Well, as a series, despite a significant amount of material remaining unreleased. Hopefully they’ll get a proper wrap-up. I bet things are gonna work out okay for that Anakin kid!

By the end, they’ll have gotten five seasons and change out of a conflict that is generally agreed to have lasted about three years. M*A*S*H, the champion, went seven years longer than the actual Korean war, and even did an episode that yada yada’d over the whole of 1951.

Whether in a galaxy far far away, or Point Place, Wisconsin, there’s a danger to setting a show in a specific time period; presumably they hope for a long run, but if your premise is how different things were in 1957, you’re going to have to either evolve with the fictionalized times, or throw up your hands and start fudging things so you don’t have to become That 80s Show. No one wants that.

(On a related note, maybe that’s why the new show The Goldbergs gives me such rage migraines. I get the idea of Patton Oswalt as the “unreliable narrator,” talking about stuff that happened in “nineteen eighty…something,” but really, that’s just an excuse to have Pac-Man and Say Anything… happening at the same time. PICK A YEAR. )

The Wonder Years gracefully transitioned into the 1970s. Laverne and Shirley didn’t do much to suggest the 60s apart from that prominently displayed Beatles poster. Who knows where The Secret Diary Of Desmond Pfeiffer would have gone, in a more just universe?

On a related note, here’s a better look at the poster from our previous Star Wars-related strip. Click to embiggen:

– Richmond