This Tuesday sees the release of Star Wars: The Clone Wars - The Complete Season Five on Blu-ray and DVD along with a Collector’s Edition set of Season 1-5. It’s the end of an era for Star Wars fans, with The Clone Wars having come to an end after airing 108 episodes. With these new home video releases here, I had a lengthy conversation with the The Clone Wars’ supervising director, Dave Filoni, about saying goodbye to the show and what it’s like looking back at the entire series. We also spoke about the much-anticipated “bonus content” episodes of The Clone Wars still to be seen -- which were episodes originally intended for the uncompleted Season 6 -- and, of course, Filoni’s current job, as one of the executive producers on Star Wars Rebels

Animatic for an unfinished portion from Season 5's Maul/Sidious fight: Loading

I should note that since I did this interview, at the end of September, a couple of big things have been revealed. Filoni has now disclosed that the additional Clone Wars episodes are complete and will be seen in early 2014 , and we got a much better idea about what to expect in Rebels – via the reveal of a major new villain and many other details about the show’s era and setting discussed at New York Comic Con.Also, you'll see we don't get into a lot of plot points about Season 5, as I'd already had a conversation with Filoni about that subject before the end of the series was announced.

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It’s unbelievable. I don’t think about it a lot. It went by so quickly. George used to talk about making 100 episodes all the time, and we all kind of just thought, “Uh huh, well, I guess he can do that, but...” I always remember shows I worked on -- I was on King of the Hill I believe when The Simpsons hit 100 episodes. So it was always something you thought of as, “Wow, that must be a good show to make it that far.” So I was really proud of everybody when we hit that. What I’m most proud of I think is if people begin with Season 1 and watch it all the way through, they see an improvement on every level. That’s not to take anything away from the people who worked in the beginning, but we had to start somewhere, and then we learned and learned and applied our knowledge going forward. We became dramatically better creators of these stories and executing these stories than we were in the beginning. I think that’s one of the things I’m most proud of. We didn’t just make it one way and continue to make that. Everything about the show got better, from the writing to the animation to the rendering, the way we filmed it. I think that that really shows when you watch it as a complete series.Having been on the show for so long and knowing that five seasons is quite a long time for an animated series, especially action-adventure, it was always a concern in the back of my mind, “How much can Cartoon Network continue to squeeze out of this?” I know they were very happy with it, but it’s five seasons, and I used to tell George a kid that was ten years old when Clone Wars started, now they’re going to be 15. Are we still bringing in enough new viewers? I definitely think that we started bringing in a lot of older viewers that might have at first written off Clone Wars as something just for kids. But I think we were gaining older viewers, and they were discovering the show, but a lot of kids who had grown up with it -- and some had moved on. So when we were doing this big arc with Ahsoka, I wanted to make sure that it had a big sense of finality to it. I wanted to make sure that just in case it was the end of some format version of Clone Wars that it felt complete for people. That’s why, usually, I try to direct either the season opener or the season ender, and mostly when Ahsoka’s involved I try to direct those episodes. I had for that moment, whether it meant an ending on a certain network or an ending for her character, it was an ending for her as far as who she was at that moment; an ending of where she was as a character and the beginning of something else. I always knew the way I wanted to shoot those sequences. It really just kind of worked out. It became really poignant as the days went on that as that character walked away from the temple down those stairs, I think a lot of people that worked on the show identified with that, as the show then literally came to a close and a lot of those guys moved on from Clone Wars. It’s a pretty emotional moment for the crew itself and symbolizes that time period for us, a big transition.It was a big deal. I never think of things as a surprise. You have to always kind of be ready for a change in our business, but I think most of all what didn’t hit me immediately but over time, is that I used to see Dee Baker and Corey Burton and Cat Taber and James Arnold Taylor and Ashley Eckstein and Matt Lanter all the time. I used to see them every couple weeks for about eight years. I still talk to Ashley quite a bit, but the rest of them, there’s not a lot of time to see them. So you begin to miss the people. I think when you talk about anybody on a production, you do miss a lot of the people that you used to work with that have since moved on -- doing new and exciting things, no doubt -- but it was a great place and time to be a part of Lucasfilm and Star Wars, for sure, being at the end of Revenge of the Sith and then going all the way to this passing the baton to Kathy Kennedy. Now that I look at it, it’s really a significant era for Lucasfilm and Star Wars. I think it’s an honor at the end to be a part of that. A lot of us that worked on that series directly with George are still here and going to carry that work forward. I think that’s what I take away from it most of all.

Dave Filoni Discusses Star Wars: The Clone Wars - Season 5

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Yeah, it’s rather entertaining from my side of it. I can remember when Ahsoka came out, and I was telling Ashley Eckstein, “Oh my gosh, just so you know, this isn’t going to be a universally loved character. We’re really going to have to fight for this, and you’re going to have to be cool and understand why people feel this way and give them their space, because fans are passionate, and they have a right not to like things. Just roll with it, and as long as we do well and stay true to what we’re trying to do and listen to George, this is going to be great.” So by the end of it -- first I had adults saying, “What a lame character. I don’t want her around Anakin.” Then at the end it’s like, “Why is she going away!? She’s not going to die, is she? My kid will be so upset.” Then there are some people who just hate her from start to finish, and they’re awesome too. You know, I appreciate the directness of it. I think it’s funny. I think that a lot of things that people wonder or think about Rebels, which I’m on now, are the same things they wondered and were afraid of in Clone Wars at the beginning too.But now there almost seems to be with Clone Wars… Since it’s ending, it’s been elevated in their minds to a level of “Well, that now we can say we like, because it’s over. We don’t know the next things that we’re not going to like about it. So we know all the things we like and don’t like about it, so now we’re okay with it.” They’ve all kind of taken Clone Wars under their wings for the most part. But I think in the end, with 100 episodes of Clone Wars, no matter what type of Star Wars fan you are -- and I think that’s something a lot of people miss; there are a lot of types of Star Wars fans, and by now they want different things out of the saga. Some people want it to be like A New Hope, some people want it to be very dark. Some people want it to not be about main characters and about side characters. You know, everybody has a different need. Clone Wars, by the nature of the way George had to tell the stories, covers a lot of that. So if you just like bounty hunters, we’ve got that. If you just like Sith Lords fighting Sith Lords, we’ve got that. Sith Lords fighting Jedi, we’ve got that. Force gods that you never thought of, we’ve got that. Just about R2-D2 and C-3PO, got that. If you are a holdout Jar Jar Binks lover, we’ve got that. A whole range of clone people, we’ve got that. There was something to satisfy everybody in the end. I think you can definitely target in the episodes you like and disregard the rest. I know there are a bunch of Zillo Beast lovers, which I never saw that coming. There are some people that are just like, “Why did you kill him, and when is he being cloned?” [Laughs]Hey, you know, nothing surprises me anymore. It’s the same way I guess George felt when he found out that I was a fan of Plo Koon. He’s thinking, “I created all these great characters. Why are you a fan of this guy that just sits in the chair?” I guess that’s fair, right? I’m part of it, so there you go.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars - Season 5 Review

That’s a funny thing that you bring that up the Rancor Keeper, because when someone leaves Lucasfilm Animation, we usually make a nice card for them and we do a nice drawing of them, but the drawing is always of them as a Jedi or a clone trooper or bounty hunter -- no one’s ever leaving the company dressed as the Rancor Keeper, you know? Why is that? He has feelings and emotions too!

Continue to Page 2 as Filoni discusses favorite Clone Wars storylines and conversations he's had with George Lucas about the show ending.