Image: Lucasfilm Ltd.
In Season 7 of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, we met Clone Force 99, aka the “Bad Batch.” Now they’re getting a Disney+ series to call their own.
The elite commando squad that consists of “defective” clone troopers (aka mutants) is essentially a Star Wars-y spin on the X-Men. They popped up for an arc in the final season of Clone Wars, and starting in 2021 they’re starring in their own set of animated stories on Disney’s streaming service.
A brief story breakdown doesn’t offer much in the way of specifics, but it does suggest the series will pick up after the events of the previous series. “In the post-Clone War era, they will take on daring mercenary missions as they struggle to stay afloat and find new purpose,” Disney’s description reads.
“Giving new and existing fans the final chapter of Star Wars: The Clone Wars has been our honor at Disney+, and we are overjoyed by the global response to this landmark series,” Disney+ exec Agnes Chu said in a statement.
“While the Clone Wars may have come to its conclusion, our partnership with the groundbreaking storytellers and artists at Lucasfilm Animation is only beginning. We are thrilled to bring Dave Filoni’s vision to life through the next adventures of the Bad Batch.”
Filoni was also the showrunner on Clone Wars, and he credits the underlying premise of the Bad Batch back to George Lucas. In the days before Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm (and the massive franchises it controls), Lucas was closely involved in the development and long-term planning around Clone Wars.
Filoni talked about Lucas’ vision for what eventually became the Bad Batch in Season 7 during an interview ahead of the Disney+ exclusive season’s premiere earlier in 2020.
“He wanted to explore this idea that there were clones that were a little bit more unique from one another that were like a special forces unit that had enhanced skills. And so the trick for those characters is really making them feel special in what their abilities could be, but not making them superheroes,” Filoni told Entertainment Weekly.
“Wrecker should not be the Hulk, even though we love the Hulk and those types of stories. That’s not what Star Wars is. So we had to keep it all kind of within the reality of Star Wars.”
Look for Star Wars: The Bad Batch to arrive on Disney+ sometime in 2021.
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