What's in and what's out

As a preliminary bit of business, I wanted to clarify exactly what this blog will be covering: the core Star Wars saga as it is reckoned today. There may very well be divergent schools of thought as to what that entails, and that's fine! When it comes to a mythology as enduring and expansive as Star Wars, permutations based on individual tastes and systems of classification are going to be many and varied. But this is our roadmap for the project:

The Phantom Menace
Attack of the Clones
The Clone Wars
Revenge of the Sith
The Bad Batch
Rebels
Solo
Rogue One
A New Hope
Empire Strikes Back
Return of the Jedi
The Mandalorian
The Book of Boba Fett
The Force Awakens
The Last Jedi
The Rise of Skywalker

It's not "all the live-action stuff" because it includes some cartoons as well. It's not "all the movies" because it includes various shows, which are clearly going to be the most time-consuming part of the project. It's not "everything that's canon" because there are quite a few comics and novels that have been published in the past few years which are considered canon. It's not "all the non-print stuff" because it leaves out the animated LEGO Star Wars stuff - which is hilarious and which our family are big fans of! - and video games. Basically it's just one of those "I know it when I see it" kind of things. The list above is what feels right to me when asked what I would cover if I were going to cover "the entire story of Star Wars". By necessity it leaves out some weird oddities which I have a certain fondness for specifically because they are so weird and odd, but so it goes.

One open question which still remains is the exact order we are going to watch things in. It's essentially as listed, but my co-pilot has already indicated that it would be a more pure narrative experience to do some specific interpolation. By which he means, things start off simple enough with the first two prequel movies, and then we'll be watching Clone Wars for a good while, but not the entire series straight through. Apparently there are a few episodes towards the end which actually take place during or after Revenge of the Sith, so we should weave in the movie where it fits. Similarly there is a point at which it will make sense to pause Rebels and watch Solo, which obviously takes place before certain late episodes of Rebels. My plan is basically to trust in the internet as to the proper viewing order down to the tv-episode-granular level. Some nerd somewhere has doubtless figured it all out.

And another thing which we will have to deal with is the new material Disney is currently producing. Obi Wan Kenobi, Cassian Andor and Ahsoka Tano are all getting series on Disney+ at some point. If they come out while we are working our way through the saga, we will be happy to add them to the list and watch them when our rewatc catches up to their setting. But if they are set in a time period we've already passed, I'm not sure how we will handle that. Watch them anyway but not blog about them? Save them for after the project is done, and blog about them as a bonus? Time will tell.