3. Star Wars Rebels

I remember when Rebels was first announced and the reaction from Star Wars fans was, unsurprisingly, very negative. People complained that it didn’t look good, they were upset that it seemingly killed The Clone Wars, and as the first new Star Wars series from Disney, a subset of fans assumed it would be a terrible thing designed to rewrite lore and erase past Star Wars adventures.

All of these complaints and fears would end up being completely wrong. For one thing, Rebels’ art style was directly inspired by original concept art for the old Star Wars movies and as the series continued, its animation got better. It’s now considered one of the best-looking Star Wars shows around. It also didn’t kill The Clone Wars; instead, it was a sequel to that series. But before revealing that to fans, it introduces a new cast of plucky-but-flawed scoundrels, including a former Jedi, and slowly turns them into fan-favorites as they take on Thrawn, a character from the EU brought into canon via Rebels

Then, once series supervising director Dave Filoni and Lucasfilm had introduced new characters and developed them into fully fleshed-out heroes worth caring about on their own, they revealed that Rebels was a continuation of Clone Wars. Ashoka and Rex were back. Hondo was here. Darth Maul returned. Story threads and lore first featured in Clone Wars got picked up in Rebels, like the Dark Saber and the fate of Mandalore. And then Lucasfilm ended the series on a cliffhanger, and all those fans who complained about Rebels were begging for a resolution that wouldn’t come until the live-action Ahsoka series in 2023. Now that’s how you run a large franchise TV series. — ZZ