This Could Suck. Badly.

So Friday The Clone Wars opens here in America. The Australians get it a day earlier, but this is Karma's way of compensating them for all the dingo-related baby incidents. Enjoy it, mates. The universe is putting a giant check in the box next to "even" on your scorecard.
The Clone Wars is basically a TV pilot, but George Lucas saw an opportunity to make a few dollars with a theatrical release. I mean, "A theatrical release is better able to showcase the work itself."
Mostly, I think the whole thing is a good idea.
In the movies, we got to see very little of the actual Clone Wars themselves. In Episode Two, we saw the opening battle, and the beginning of Episode Three featured another, but that was pretty much it.
The Clone Wars movie (and 100 episodes following on Cartoon Network) are supposed to fill in the gap between these two battles with more battles. I'm in favor of this if they do it right.
Some stuff needs to be taken care of during the run of the series if they don't expect me to ignore the work completely.
There need to be a lot of nods to the original trilogy. Since the whole thing is CGI, they won't get a better chance. Chewbacca could be all over this thing.
Mace Windu needs to be pretty prominent for two reasons. The first is that Samuel L. Jackson is actually doing the voice. The big reason is that Mace Windu is the coolest Jedi ever.
The most important thing this movie/series can do is make Anakin Skywalker in some way likable. In the movies he goes from whiny to arrogant and on through to gullible in a pretty disappointing range. Additionally, there isn't a lot of room on the surface for surprises. We know who dies and how. We know Anakin shifts from "possible chosen Jedi" to "takes the most manipulative man in the galaxy at his word about the status of his children", but we don't see a lot of that transition on-screen. There needs to be some indication to the audience as to why Obi-Wan didn't toss Anakin out an airlock as soon as they left Tatooine.
During the Clone Wars, Anakin is a war hero and he is secretly married to an ex-queen and he hangs out with weird-headed aliens and he carries a lightsaber. There is absolutely no excuse for us to not really like that guy until he turns into Darth Vader.
And then probably after he turns into Darth Vader because Force-choking is the absolute most-awesome thing ever.
The scary part about The Clone Wars is that it has the potential for to quickly lapse into the CGI pitfall of all Jar Jar all the time, which would probably cause me to vomit popcorn.
Either way, I'm going and dragging my family. It is my responsibility to see everything Lucas Arts does and then rush to the internet to pick it apart and complain.
This is a responsibility I take very seriously.
I have five or six of those "responsibilities". I'll go into more of them in some other post.