The Clone Wars

All the animated Star Wars shows created by Dave Filone have been astounding and exciting, with interesting explorations of many different ideas and characters, both old and new, and I think they are underrated, because people tend to look at them like just some "childish cartoons", which they are not. If you're a fan of Star Wars, I definitely recommend them all, because they serve as a great expansions of the Star Wars lore, and they have a vast of hugely lovable characters that are instantly memorable.

One of the great aspects of all of this shows is the music which was done by Kevin Kiner, with an array of co-composers, who provided different cues for the dozens of episodes for all the different seasons of each show. Apart from Kevin Kiner we have people like Takeshi Furukawa, David Glen Russell, Matthew St. Laurent, Sean Kiner, Dean Kiner, etc. All of them have been an essential part of the music of the show, and certainly deserve recognition as well.

For The Clone Wars, they weren’t able to afford a proper orchestra, so they played around with samples, together with some live instruments, sometimes trying to pay homage to John Williams’ sound, but others times deviating into their own style. Fortunately, for the last season, as well as some episodes here and there through the previous seasons, they were finally able to have a proper orchestra to record their score, resulting in a much more interesting sound. This will maybe make some of the listeners to not be able to fully engage with it since the sound quality is very different from one cue to the other. This is also due to the fact that there have only been a couple of official soundtrack releases, one for the movie, another one for the first seasons, and then three separate albums for the three narrative arcs of the final season. This means that the rest of the music has mostly been released by the composers themselves via soundcloud, their own websites and similar places, deriving in worse sound quality than what we would have with a proper official release.

With all this in mind, I still think there are some great moments of music hidden in here, and it’s definitely worth exploring for fans of the music of Star Wars, so withouth further ado, I will get right into it, analyzing the different themes that have been presented and developed through the seasons (some of them even carrying over to other shows like Rebels or the Bad Batch). I also have to note that the thematic connections are not always clear, and sometimes a theme that’s supposed to represent something, then gets re-purposed in other episode. This likely happens because of the huge amount of music they had to put out for the entire show, which led to some sections being reutilized, tracked or things like that. Let’s get into it!

Obviously, we have to start with the Main Theme for the saga, which is not really featured at all in the underscore of the show, with the exception of the re-arrangement of the theme during the “Main Titles and A Galaxy Divided”, and then in a similar arrangemet during the “End Credits”. In a very similar fashion to what happens to the Main Theme, the Rebel Fanfare is used as an interlude to that melody in the “End Credits”. Both themes are here used to connect the show to the main saga, but apart from that they’re not really present within the underscore of the show.

This theme on the other hand is the previously established identity with the most screen time. There are a couple of new variations on the melody which become new themes within the show (and which will be analyzed later), but also the theme itself appears quite a lot. Standard statements of the theme play in “Jedi Eulogy”, “Yoda Explores Dagobah” or “Yoda’s Journey Ends”, but in the Mortis arc it gets extensive development, together with a variation on the idea especifically tied to Mortis. Listen to the interplay of this idea with the Force Theme at 2:25 of “Father’s Sacrifice”, or at 0:53 of “Anakin Dreams of Shmi”. The theme turns quite emotional at the opening of “Ahsoka Leaves”.

Although Darth Sidious is not really that present in the show, at least not in his dark side alter ego, the Emperor theme has a couple of fantastic appearances, and one of the highlights is definitely his confrontation against Maul and his brother, Savage. Listen to it at 0:33 of “You Have Become a Rival” or at 1:06 of “Maul and Savage Duel Palpatine”

During most of their scenes together in the show, these two characters have their own new ideas underscoring their forbidden romance, but in Season 7, for a brief scene of them talking through a hologram, Kevin Kiner decided to finally bring back the Across the Stars theme, which you can listen to at 1:11 of “Anakin and Padme” on winds, before their own theme takes over for the rest of the cue

But obviously, it’s not all Williams’ work, and Kiner and co. composed a great catalogue of ideas relating to many different aspects, characters and locations over the seven seasons. It’s worth noting that since most of the music is unreleased, or only released in low quality, some of the themes have smaller representation on the released tracks, and even some of them are almost completely missing, so with that in mind, let’s get right into the themes and motifs of Clone Wars (some of which, as I mentioned, carried over to other shows later on, like Rebels or even The Mandalorian).

It could be argued that she is the main character of the show, and she has many different ideas associated with different aspects of her character, but her main identity is the theme that makes the bigger emotional impact through the show, even carrying over to the characters live action appearance in The Mandalorian (and I hope that whoever scores the Ahsoka show is able to develop this idea into the score, since I think it’s now strongly associated with her).

The theme appears here and there through the show, but for her dramatic arc at the end of season 5 it’s where the theme really returns with some great new interesting variations. “Fugitive in the Sewers” opens with a ttragic rendition of the theme, before it gets arranged for an action sequence in “Anakin Wants Her Alive”, or a cool heroic statement at 0:36 of “Lightsaber Duel on Level 1315”.

It turns somber at 0:16 of “Ahsoka is Captured”, and tragic at 3:12 of “Jedi Council Hearing” and at 0:42 of “Entering the Chambers”, before the theme’s emotional closure at the end of the last episode of Season 5.