See A Ton Of Never-Before-Seen Early ‘Star Wars: The Clone Wars’ Concept Sketches [Comic-Con 2018]

On Thursday afternoon, Lucasfilm presented its 10th Anniversary Celebration of Star Wars: The Clone Wars at San Diego Comic-Con International. The big news revealed at the end of the panel is that Disney is bringing The Clone Wars back from the dead for a 12-episode season on Disney’s upcoming streaming service. You can read more about that and watch the trailer here.

The rest of the presentation was a look back at the beloved animated series with a panel that included creator Dave Filoni, producer Athena Portillo, actors Ashley Eckstein and Matt Lanter and composer Kevin Kliner. The panel featured stories from the show’s origins and was filled with concept sketches from Dave Filoni, most of which have never been seen before, some showing moments and ideas that never made it into the series. Keep reading to check them out.

The Clone Wars Announcement Trailer Came Together At The Last Minute

The presentation began with a screening of the first trailer for The Clone Wars that was shown in a small room at Star Wars Celebration over a decade ago. The trailer almost never happened at all. Filoni reveals that George Lucas put him on the spot about a week before the convention, and that the original plan was for the series to not have an appearance at the con.

And finding the Celebration trailer for the panel wasn’t easy, as it was hidden on a random hard drive in the Lucasfilm vaults.

George Lucas - Clone Wars

The First Season of Clone Wars Was Designed In A Two Week Story Conference

The initial 26 episodes of The Clone Wars were sketched out and designed during a two-week story conference held at Skywalker Ranch. George Lucas himself was in the room every day as they hashed out the stories for a whole season on big white boards, often designing three episodes a day in these sessions. The whole team slept at the ranch for the two week conference, and Filoni joked that they spent some time on their nights off scheming about how to talk George out of the ideas he proposed that they didn’t necessarily like.

Clone Wars Producer Was Originally Working On Strange Magic

Another funny revelation of the panel is that producer Athena Portillo was initially working at Lucasfilm developing the movie that many years later became Strange Magic. Portillo was a real Star Wars fan, complete with a custom franchise license plate, and Filloni was able to rescue her from the fairies and welcome her to a galaxy far, far away.

Clone Wars - cast sketch

The Original Clone Wars Line-Up Looked More Like The Rebels Crew

Working early on with season one head writer Henry Gilroy, the team was trying to come up with the crew line-up. Originally it was going to be two Jedi working with smugglers in the black market, and while that exact make-up was not what was finalized in this series, it’s pretty much what came to be in Filoni’s follow-up series, Star Wars Rebels.

Clone Wars - early sketch

A Ton Of Filoni’s Sketches and Early Never-Before-Seen Concept Artwork Revealed

Probably most interesting was the bevy of slides featuring never-before-seen concept artwork and Filoni’s personal sketches (some of them weren’t even in the Lucasfilm archives but rescued from boxes in Filoni’s office space) showing us how the series evolved and some alternate designs and paths not explored.

Dave Filoni showed off never before seen sketches he put together during the production of the series. The sketches were done on the day during the story sessions while they were talking it out with George. In one of the images, we see a sketch of a little baby Plo Koon that Filoni pitched but George turned down. Filoni sketched George saying no next to the drawing of baby Plo. Other artwork showed Cad Bane in an arc that didn’t get produced and alternate starship artwork, including one that was almost Ventress’s ship. We saw some sketches from The Bad Batch, which was released online as a story reel but never rendered. One tank-like vehicle had a Wookiee pelt hanging as a flag.

Here are more images shown at the presentation: