The first trailer for Disney Channel’s next Star Wars animated series, Star Wars Resistance, dropped last week and fans were split since the follow-up to the critically acclaimed and fandom-beloved Star Wars Rebels was a different animation style and seemed to be skewing younger than the previous series.
There’s a very simple reason for it: it’s a kids’ show for kids. When you look at it through that lens–albeit, a lens that’s hard for many Star Wars fans to view–it makes the initial backlash all the sillier.
To further prove this, we now have featurette introducing us to the members of Team Fireball, and the voice actors portraying them. “I want it to have a sense of childlike fun and adventure,” creator Dave Filoni says very early on.
We get our first sense of what Team Fireball is all about. Filoni talks about how the team are not part of the major goings on in the Resistance, and in fact are participating in small-time races to make money and continue on. The video shows us Kaz, the ostensible hero of the new show (which is for kids), who is a great pilot but can’t quite get a handle on the spying angle when he’s entrusted on such missions by Poe Dameron. We also meet Yeager, the show’s father figure, Tam a young mechanic who used to be an ace pilot, and Neeku, a super smart, super upbeat Nikto whom Poe introduces to Kaz.
Throughout the video, the producers and writers of the show talk about how they wanted to make the show for a younger audience. This is, of course, the absolute correct call. Why? Because grown-up Star Wars fans presumably became fans when they were kids. The movies are for all ages, and while there were a couple of animated series that didn’t last long (Droids and Ewoks), there weren’t any series definitely set in the continuity of the movies that was made specifically for children. Kids are the lifeblood of Star Wars and have kept it going all these years.
So it’s ultimately antithetical to the whole ethos of Star Wars as an entity to not cater to the younger audience in some way. And need I remind you, Rebels began and seemed like a much younger and less integral series than The Clone Wars and it ended up being, for our money, the best thing to come out of Disney-owned Star Wars so far. So maybe adults shouldn’t huff and puff because a thing made for people younger than they are isn’t exclusively for them.
Star Wars Resistance premieres October 7 at 10PM ET/PT on Disney Channel.