The Original Clone Wars Were Way Different

Wonder what people in the '80s who were curious about the mentioned Clone Wars would have said if someone told them that the conflict was fought by millions of Boba Fetts. 😅

Before the prequels, I thought the clone wars were fought by trillions of clones on both sides, so citizens didn’t have to fight and eventually cloning was banned for this reason because the existence of fully expendable soldiers caused more wars.

Worth mentioning that, in the rough drafts of Empire Strikes Back, Lando Calrissian was a clone who survived the clone wars, and Leia was also distrustful of him because of anti-clone prejudice. There's an alternate history where we'd see countless Billy Dee Williamses throughout the prequels.

The way ObiWan talked about the clone wars in a New Hope always made me feel like it was 40 years ago.

Well, it's hard to build a whole universe off what was essentially a throwaway line.

The Zahn books always gave me the impression that the Clone Wars weren't a single war, but a set of conflicts over several decades.

It's pretty fascinating to see material made before the prequels depicting that Era in their own unique way. For example, there's an art from a cancelled 90's card game that shows baby Leia being protected by her unnamed mother from a young and unburned Darth Vader, having Anakin here the appearance of Mark Hamill Truly mindblowing

Lucas sprang a lot of surprises on the EU authors. Another big one was the Jedi Order's "no attachments" policy. Because the OT had established that Anakin Skywalker had been married and fathered children, and no mention was made by Obi-Wan or Yoda about this having been forbidden, authors assumed that there were entire Jedi extended families with long histories in the Order and that the Jedi were not as monastic as the PT would establish them as being. There were also lots of little things, like Obi-Wan supposedly keeping a low profile on Tatooine - by wearing what would turn out to be standard Jedi uniform. Also, his apparent age.

Don't forget the earlier idea of The Emperor as well. In the A New Hope novelization (so before any more than 1 single Star Wars movie was a reality), The Emperor was a decent politician who rose to power and was made Emperor, but then the military performed a quiet coup, setting the Emperor up as a figurehead while men like Tarkin actually ruled the Galaxy. That idea quickly changed in Empire Strikes Back.

One aspect I think gets overlooked a lot, even by Lucas and Star Wars, is that it's called the Clone WARS. As in more than one war. Multiple players, multiple fronts, multiple factions, and a much longer span of time. In a lot of the older material, they even speak of the Clone Wars as practically its own era or generation, as an ongoing thing of such horror and brutality that it's basically scarred everyone.

For anyone wondering why Ben was older than he should be after watching the prequels; well this is the "why". He was intended to be older because the Clone Wars were set longer ago, before the prequels happened. Why Lucas changed this concept is a fact that he only knows.

This reminds me of an old Star Wars fan theory I once heard about from the original release of "A New Hope", possibly the first major fan theory in the franchise. It was that the Obi-Wan we see in the movie is actually clone with the designation 0B1, which he then changed into his name after the war. Funny how that circled back around into the cannon depiction of the clones, with clones like CT-5555 taking the name "Fives" in the same manor. I think it's an interesting part of the fandom's history for sure.

As it was presented it's less likely that the galaxy would call the conflict "the clone wars" and would probably refer to it as "The Galactic Civil War"

“The Prequels Changed Everything.” That’s an understatement both on the canon and meta level.

I still love the theory that one of Lucas' earlier ideas was that jedi were the clones, supported by C'Baoth later with Zahn's novels. That Obiwan was actually a clone of Ben Kenobi called OB-1; his name spelled like that in the same way Artoo and Threepio get spelled in the novels.

In the older novels, it was strongly hinted that the 'clone wars' were actually wars between different warlords, each with their own army of clones, and the Republic was just caught in the middle and powerless to stop their worlds being conquered and ravaged until the Jedi broke their neutrality and started organizing a fight back. Senator Palpatine supported them, using them as a tool to seize political power and restructure the republic into an empire, while secretly being one of the 'Clone Masters' who had perpetuated the wars, until he could use the jedi and republic to wipe out his enemies, seize power, and wipe out the jedi all at once. That would have made a much better prequel trilogy, in my opinion.

Waiting for an author to slip in a Clone Trooper named Jaango.

When exactly was the Clone Wars museum on Coruscant supposed to have been founded? If it was during the Empire, the idea that the Jedi went as far as to install a puppet ruler of the Republic could have been propaganda.

see the idea that the clones were the bad guys was actually something I had thought too before the prequels came out

Growing up, all the way until I saw episode 2 in theaters, I assumed the clones would be the bad guys. My thought was that at some point in the war, the "president" of the republic was replaced with a clone, along with Clone Jedi - installed by Senator Palpatine. When the good jedi overthrew the bad clones, Palpatine was able to declare in the chaos that the Jedi had installed a puppet leader and needed to make an empire in the name of peace.