Star Wars Maestro Dave Filoni Had A Hilarious Reaction To George Lucas Introducing Ahsoka
George Lucas has never been very concerned about canon, or what other people think of his movies. Instead, when it came to "Star Wars," Lucas acted like any good Game Master and followed only one rule from the very beginning — the rule of cool.
Whether it was retconning Luke and Leia's kiss into an innocent sibling bond, or endlessly tinkering with the original trilogy until he arrived at his final vision for the franchise with the Maclunkey cut, Lucas always chose the cooler idea over consistency in the universe. And, of course, let's not forget Lucas' biggest retcon: making Darth Vader Luke's father.
This is an approach Lucas kept going into "The Clone Wars." The retired filmmaker would constantly drop in on the writers with ideas for things he thought sounded cool and left it for them to figure out how to implement, like Maul being alive despite his rather irreversible death in "The Phantom Menace."
Possibly the biggest retcon in "The Clone Wars" was Ahsoka, a character George Lucas kind of came up with despite never mentioning Anakin had a padawan before. Speaking with Rebel Force Radio, Dave Filoni once talked about the moment Lucas came up with what he described as a "pretty big bump in the road." "I remember saying to George I said, 'Well, you know, Anakin doesn't have a Padawan,'" Filoni said, adding:
"Let's put it realistically here, I mean, you know, he says, 'Anakin Skywalker has a Padawan.' And then Henry Gilroy and I kind of look at each other like, 'Okay. Um. But, no. Anakin doesn't have a Padawan.' And he just kind of paused and looked at both of us, and then he said, 'Anakin has a Padawan.'"
The birth of a legend
Filoni is an avid "Star Wars" fan with lots of knowledge of the franchise and its extensive universe, so he would know there was no way Anakin had a padawan.
"I suppose I could go on arguing this point in and out and bring the textbooks in," Filoni added. "But, you know, I preferred the choice to say, 'Well, okay, why does he want to do that and let me talk about it with him and let's see where we can go with this.'"
This turned out to be significant for the history of the franchise. As Filoni himself admitted, "I really like Ahsoka. You know, she's become one of my favorite characters," and you can tell, given how the director went from teasing the character's death to voice actor Ashley Eckstein to then making Ahsoka one of the few Jedi who survived Order 66 as well as an essential part of the Rebellion in "Star Wars Rebels" and now giving the character her very own spin-off TV show. And all of this considering that, as Filoni admitted in that same interview, Ahsoka's been "a struggle to fight for and get up on screen" due to initial backlash from certain fans.
Lucas' involvement in the creation of Ahsoka is just part of his larger involvement with the show — involvement which was not supposed to be significant, at least at first. Instead, he was originally going to just leave all decisions to Henry Gilroy and Dave Filoni but later changed his mind. In the end, Lucas not only suggested creating certain characters or bringing some back from the dead, but also entire arcs, like how Filoni tells the story of Lucas asking the writers to do a 3-episode arc all about bank deregulations.