Bounty hunter Cad Bane, wearing breathing tubes, confronts Emperor Palpatine. Image courtesy Lucasfilm
Cad Bane, baddest bounty hunter in the Star Wars multiverse, blasts his way onto television screens Friday night in Clone Wars' Season One finale, "Hostage Crisis."
Like his role model, Lee Van Cleef's Angel Eyes, the sociopathic star of Sergio Leone's immortal 1966 spaghetti western The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, Cad Bane is a merciless mercenary who makes trouble for standards and practices.
Rattling cages has become par for the course for Cartoon Network's animated series, which racked up record ratings for boys 2 to 14, while schooling them on unsavory subjects like political corruption, militarism, colonialism and worse. The recent three-episode Ryloth narrative even touched on war children and human shields.
May the Force be with us all.
Banes is modeled on The Good, The Bad and the Ugly's Angel Eyes, as shown in this faux-western "Wanted" poster. Image courtesy Lucasfilm
Unafraid to refer to contemporary topics, Clone Wars remains TV's most action-packed series on television as well as its smartest. Filtering mature themes and geopolitical tangles through eye-popping visuals and blinding battle sequencing, it closes Season One as a rare triumph amid an animated landscape that that has sadly deteriorated since equally sharp shows like Justice League Unlimited, The Batman and even Harvey Birdman folded.
For the finale episode, George Lucas turned to Sergio Leone's spaghetti western psycho for inspiration.
"He had a clear idea for this bad guy who plays by his own set of rules, whose moral code is dictated by his fee," explained Clone Wars' supervising director Dave Filoni in a press release on "Hostage Crisis." "It's a cool parallel to our world, and a cool balance in theirs."
Unlike Angel Eyes, Bane works well with others, including the bloodthirsty Aurra Sing. Image courtesy Lucasfilm
Unlike the loner Angel Eyes, Cad Bane has a posse, which he use to foil Jedi and Sith alike. These outsiders introduce a break from the oppressive shadow cast by the series' ongoing cosmological tug-of-war. It's also pretty awesome to find someone in the Star Wars universe cocky enough to tell Palpatine to go Force himself.
Watching Cad Bane and other characters of the increasingly fertile Star Wars multiverse up the ante for Clone Wars, one wonders how the series, slated to return in fall 2009, will keep the Droideka rolling. If it's anything like the first season, standards and practices is going to be busy for a few light years.
Sing scopes out the fight in Clone Wars' Season One finale, "Hostage Crisis." Image courtesy Lucasfilm
Photos courtesy of Lucasfilm
See also:
- Is Clone Wars the Most Action-Packed Series on Television?
- Half-Naked Female Jedis, Coming Right Up in Clone Wars
- *Clone Wars *Reboots Star Wars' Peripheral Players
- From Pawns to People, Star Wars' Clones Evolve
- The Ratings Force Is Strong With Cartoon Network's Clone Wars
- Clone Wars TV Show Touches Down, Looks Killer
