Anakin You Feel It?

I've been spending more time than the average adult lately thinking about Anakin Skywalker. This is in part because the Tuned In Jrs. recently came into possession of the Lego Star Wars prequel videogame, allowing them to discover the franchise's whole Jar Jar Binksian backstory. And I've been working on Time's fall arts preview, one item in which is Cartoon Network's upcoming Clone Wars animated series.

The series is set in between episodes 2 and 3, which means we get to spend a whole lot of time with the elder Mr. Skywalker, before he becomes Darth Vader. George Lucas is promising a lot of the series, something on the order of 100 episodes. [Update: And there's still the promised live-action prequel series in the offing.] And assuming there are other Star Wars products in the future—and what reason is there to believe that there won't be?—one has to guess that they will also expand on the Clone Wars / Republic-era backstory. All of which means the mediocre prequel era stories will vastly outnumber the fondly remembered original series, like some kind of metastasizing growth that becomes bigger than the body it originally formed on.

Greater Star Wars minds than mine have expounded on the various problems with the prequel movies, but when it comes down to it, don't you have to place the blame on Anakin? Don't get me wrong, the idea of making a hero of the series' greatest villain is fascinating. In theory. But it involved telling a story more grown-up and psychologically acute than anything Lucas was ever interested in.

So instead you have a guy who starts out good, becomes sort of uptight and whiny, then has some dreams and some bad breaks and suddenly ends up evil. But before he dons the black suit, he remains a fairly uncomplicated good guy. Which makes cheering for him in a Clone Wars prequel all the more creepy: it's like The Young Hitler Chronicles.

That, and the fact that Anakin was simply never written or played well in the prequel movies to begin with. I've been re-watching the original trilogy with the Jrs., and I realize that they weren't exactly masterpieces of sophisticated writing. But besides having great casting, they were anchored by great, distinctive characters, which made up for a lot of corny dialogue. But Anakin? As a good guy, he was simply a peevish, boring stiff. You can hardly wait for him to turn evil already, so he can be interesting. So I can't say I relish the chance to spend even more time with him.

Of course, dude did lose his wife and ended up dying the minute he reconciled with his son. Am I being too hard on him?