Star Wars: Movies and Shows on Disney+ and More (Page 5 of 5)

How does changing one's first name seemingly fool the galaxy?  Ben Kenobi.  KENOBI!!!!  A famous Jedi, the idiot never thought to change his last name?  LOL

I find this Vader to be quite lacking.  He's full of little more than rage, like the boss of a 1990's beat em up game.  The Vader of the OT is cunning, calculating, and rarely repeat RARELY has to use the Dark Side of the Force.  You mean to tell me 7 years and one spanking from Palpatine suddenly calms him down?  Come on.  The David Prowse Vader is in full command of his emotions.  Now I suppose one would argue that the mere mention of Obi-Wan turns him into Yosemite Sam, which is ridiculous.  The inquisitors in Rebels were far more cunning as well.  It's like everyone on these Disney+ Star Wars shows are total buffoons.  Granted there aren't many universities in this universe, but seriously?  Han Solo is practically Einstein compared to all of them.

Well, to be fair, I think there's some things you're not really thinking about.

1. I can't imagine that the Jedi are that famous outside of Coruscant.  Han Solo is well traveled and lived during the time of the Jedi during a time when he'd probably be pretty into that kind of stuff, and he's essentially never heard of them.  It's hard to tell if Luke has ever heard of them - he gets really excited when he hears "Rebellion" but doesn't bat an eye when Ben says "Jedi."  Ben has to explain who the Jedi were and what a lightsaber is.  There are Imperial officers on the Death Star that refer to the Force as an "ancient religion"

My guess is that the Jedi were really well known on Coruscant but worked essentially in secret everywhere else.  People might know the Jedi by name as some sort of galactic police force but think they're basically just new age cops who think they have magic powers.

So I'd be shocked if anyone on Tattooine knew who the Jedi were, and they certainly wouldn't know the names of specific Jedi.  We know about Obi-Wan's name and we follow his story, but I don't see how he'd be famous.

2. Tattooine is essentially the middle of nowhere, and it's a place Vader would never go.  As far as I'm aware, at least in Disney canon, he never goes back after Attack of the Clones.  He always sends someone else.  So Obi-Wan could work at the spaceport in Mos Eisley with a big sign saying "Obi-Wan Kenobi, Former Jedi" on it, and Vader would never find him.  Tattooine is a blind spot.

3. Kenobi could be a really common name.  And as ireactions said, the guy is a shell of his former self.  Even if the people of Tattooine knew who the Jedi were and even if they knew who Obi-Wan was, and even if they found out some how, some might not believe it.  It'd be like finding out that Michael Jordan lived down the street from you.  First off, you might not immediately consider that it's the same guy - plenty of guys are named Michael Jordan.  Second, if he weighed 250 pounds and rode around in a wheelchair, you might not think it was him even if you got a good look at his face.

And this is a funny separation between Star Wars and Star Trek.  Star Trek came out even earlier, but Roddenberry at least tried to think forward in terms of technology.  Some of it was out of necessity (like the transporter), but at least there seems to be an effort made to accommodate advanced technology.  Like Disney, he hilariously undershot, but to be fair, TNG hilariously undershot again decades later.  I'm sure Discovery and Picard and Strange New Worlds and the Orville will hilariously undershoot.

But it doesn't seem like Lucas even tried.  Because you're right, it's just the 70s with spaceships and laser weapons.

Well, Trek itself is the reason for some of the undershooting.  Whether it's a flip phone communicator or a PADD / iPad, we've used Trek as an inspiration.

I was rewatching STAR WARS Despecialized on my 55 inch 4K TV. The TV was big when I bought it, now it's average. The Despecialized Edition by Petr Harmacek was great when first released in 2011, removing all the special edition changes, but it doesn't work as well on bigger, higher resolutions. The video quality keeps jumping back and forth from strong 720p quality to poor 480p quality that's been stretched to 720p.

The issue: Harmacek started with the HD blu-rays and the below-SD DVDs. The sub-SD-DVDs are unaltered, but they were released in a resolution that's only 640x480, so the video actually exists in 640x270 pixels instead of the full 720x480 of a DVD.

Harmacek rebuilt a cut of the original version with the blu-ray versions and reversed the odd colour alterations made to it, using a 16mm film scan as reference. Harmacek then intricately transferred the unaltered effect shots from the DVD version onto the blu-ray version. This means that entire shots or rotoscoped portions of shots are stretched, sub-standard definition effects on top of the HD shot.

Over time, Harmacek made a lot of improvements: he and other fan collectors and restorationists located scans of the original matte paintings as well as original 16mm, 35mm and 70mm negative prints of the original films. Harmacek was able to a good chunk of the DVD-sourced SD effects with HD scans.

However, these scans, done on second generation film prints that weren't well stored, are only a small upgrade from the fuzzy subSD-DVD effects; they're still not entirely matched to the underlying blu-ray quality.

Watched on a 1080p TV in the 32 - 40 inch range, the despecialized STAR WARS looked fantastic to me. The mismatches weren't really very glaring and if you're caught up in the film, it doesn't matter. But watching it on a bigger and higher-resolution TV, the despecialized versions are really distracting in how the film quality jumps from sharp blu-ray to fuzzier digital scans of old film.

I think the despecialized fan restorationist stuff was great from 2011 - 2021, but now, it's time Disney did its job and released the unaltered original trilogy. I suspect that George Lucas destroyed the original film masters that would allow Disney to rescan and rebuild each shot and each scene in a true remastering; I've read that the only master film negatives available with all the complete effects is the SPECIAL EDITIONS.

However, Disney has plenty of options: they can AI-upscale the unaltered, low-res DVD release of 2006. They can secure a theatrical print of the film, clean it up physically, scan it at 8K, and then subject it to AI-cleanup for dirt and lines and scanning issues. Given their resources, this shouldn't take more than a week for an AI-upscale of the 2006 DVDs or a year for a new scan.

Footnote: The blu-ray/special edition of EMPIRE STRIKES BACK is fine. The additions were so minimal. The light level conversion isn't great, but given the 1080p detail, it's acceptable.

I am running the scan of this 35mm theatrical print from team negative 1 through Topaz. I did, however, reduce the 4K video to 1080p so that my computer could handle it. I set Topaz it to mine all the noise for detail; it doesn't blur, but it will smooth. To avoid the waxy look, I have Topaz adding a modest amount of post-upscale grain. The computer says it'll need five days to finish the job.

Watching digital scans of 35mm film prints of STAR WARS and EMPIRE. It's interesting. These true-to-1977 and 1980 versions of STAR WARS and EMPIRE generally look quite good and nicely saturated with lifelike, natural colour as opposed to overenriched, Michael Bay style colour.

However, the Tatooine desert scenes in STAR WARS and the Cloud City scenes with bright light in EMPIRE all look a little washed out and overexposed at times.

It doesn't seem to be an 'error'; this is how the movies looked in the theatre. It seems to reflect how a film camera in the late 70s was not equipped to fully film desert sunlight and the desert scenes are constantly on the verge of overexposure with a chemical process dimming the image and therefore turning brown sand into faded yellow.

It reflects how STAR WARS was an exercise in desperation: an unsupportive studio, a budget that struggled against technological limits, four different kinds of film used throughout (which explains why the graininess jumps from thick to thin from shot to shot). It looks like a 1977 film.

EMPIRE benefitted from some modest advances in colour and film processing. But there are a few borderline overexposed shots now and then. When Leia and Han are Cloud City, the windows behind them are almost completely blown out in whites.

These shots are actually effective in establishing that these films were made under the limitations of the era. And when the lightsaber fights aren't acrobatic exercises, when the spaceships look like repurposed model kits of battleships from toy stores, when matte paintings look more like ink than steel and concrete, when aliens look more like costumes than flesh and fur, when matte lines are visible -- it's fine when surrounded by other era-specific limitations.

I think it's worth it to remaster movies for presentation on backlit TVs instead of cathode ray tubes or projectors aimed at screens, but ever since 1997, George Lucas was trying to make late 70s and early 80s movies look like they were shot on digital cameras. And it didn't work because while the image might look more modern and have CGI pressed on top of it, the content was ultimately restricted by what was possible in 1977 and 1980.

Slider_Quinn21, quite reasonably, criticizes STAR TREK for being stuck in the past of the 23rd century. STAR WARS seemed to get stuck for a long time too in endless re-releases and with fan editors now trying to put everything back the it was in 1977 and 1980.

(There was an unfaded theatrical print of RETURN OF THE JEDI that Team Negative 1 located and scanned, and aside from their usual work in cleaning and reducing accumulated grain, they didn't have to do very much restoration to get it looking bright and sharp.)

Slider_Quinn21 wondered why Leia in A NEW HOPE didn't mention her adventures with Ben Kenobi in OBI-WAN KENOBI. Why does Leia's message to Ben say, "Years ago, you served my father in the Clone Wars"? Why doesn't her message instead say something more relevant to herself and Ben, something like, "Years ago, you saved me when I was kidnapped by Imperial Inquisitors?" I offered a long, convoluted explanation about the geopolitical alliances and covert conflicts of the STAR WARS universe that I nearly fell asleep writing.

But recently, I found a simpler explanation. Apparently, A NEW HOPE has a deleted and extended scene of Leia recording her voicemail for Ben.

On the subject of changes... can Disney release the Original Trilogy in 4K without all the Special Edition changes? Is it physically possible at this point? It unfortunately won't be as simple as rescanning the masters.

I just finished some upscaling work on STAR WARS (fan-made 4K77 version) and EMPIRE (fan-made Despecialized version). The 4K77 version of STAR WARS was a 4K scan of a 35mm film print meant for theatre projection. It definitely didn't have 4K-level detail because a projection print is at least two generations removed from the original master negatives and the original is covered in mismatched levels of grain that change from shot to shot due to the mutiple layers of film to create effects.

After downscaling it to 1080p and running it through Topaz AI's grain-to-pixel algorithm, the film now has consistent grain across all shots and within that 4K scan was a 1080p level of detail. Some of the more heavily grainy scenes, after the cleanup, have a slight flickery quality. It looks like a well-presented 1977 film in 1080p.

The Despecialized EMPIRE was a 720p project combining 1080p blu-ray content with 35mm film scans for the original effects footage that looked grainy and blurry amidst the sharp blu-ray footage. But with Topaz AI upscaling it to 1080p, the sharpness and grain levels have all been levelled out; the film no longer looks mismatched. There will be a 4K80 fan release of a scanned 35mm theatrical print eventually and I imagine it'll look a little sharper than what I have here, and be a 1080p level release in a 4K file.

RETURN OF THE JEDI has a 4K scan of a 35mm release print that was fade-free and only needed to be cleaned of dirt and scratches after the scan. However, some scratches and dirt remain (although it isn't distracting). It doesn't look like a 4K level of detail to me; still it's 1080p quality.

I think Disney could get a 1080p release through scanning theatrical release prints for cleanup, but not 4K. They could definitely do a better job than fans at cleaning up scratches and dirt since they have entire facilities for that.

I suspect that George Lucas destroyed any master negatives of the Original Trilogy that contain the theatrical releases, meaning Disney can't simply rescan those in 4K.

I would like to think that Disney has all the original film elements, however, meaning that all the composite shots (locations, effects, lightsabers) could be recreated from the raw film recordings and then reassembled into a matching cut. They could scan the Special Edition masters, remove the CG scenes, and replace them with recompiled versions of the original effects footage made from the raw elements.

Alternatively, they could take any of the missing effects footage 35mm release prints, clean up the film stock, scan it and then perform AI upscaling to get it closer to a 4K presentation (although it'll still look less than 4K, just without the blocky blurriness of a stretched-to-4K image). As effects footage in motion, it might be close enough to not be distracting.

I suppose Disney could do what fan editors have done: scan 35mm prints in 4K, choose the best video quality shots and scenes from each of them (the prints are all of differing quality), reassemble the theatrical cuts, do cleanup of scratches and dirt, do colour correction based on 16mm fade-free prints and then use AI upscaling to clean up and sharpen the 4K resolution image to have a 4K-approximating level of clarity. It still won't be 4K detail, but it won't have the mild blurriness of a 1080p image being displayed at double its true size.

Disney might even pay the fan editors for their fan-created digital scans of release prints. Disney could then do AI upscaling on those scans to get them closer to 4K. Disney would have more time and graphics processing power to spend on each scene. It could pass for 4K.

Passing for 4K without being entirely there might be a good option, however. If the image quality is too modern, then the 1977 limitations of the image content can seem incongruous. If the image is always slightly less sharp than a movie that was released last week, then it's clear throughout that is a piece of art from a bygone era.

I think Slider_Quinn21 has seized on one of the primary peculiarities of STAR WARS: it almost never thinks about how depressing it is. Lucas conceived STAR WARS as a fun rollercoaster ride of space opera adventure, a movie that didn't require too much thought, just the excitement he felt when dragracing as a young man.

Naturally, he set his joyride movie in a fascist-ruled dystopian empire with his heroes being the perpetually-losing revolutionaries rebelling against a system that would keep coming back.

And of course, Lucas reduced Luke's aunt and uncle to skeletons, nuked a planet, killed pretty much everyone in Rogue Squadron, and then had Luke triumphant and happy at the end of a movie where his family had been incinerated and most of his new friends had either been blown up or suffocated in the icy vacuum of space.

Who is more traumatized? Luke Skywalker or Rembrandt Brown? Certainly, they'd have a lot to discuss in a support group.

I don't know if JJ Abrams, Rian Johnson and the people making all these other shows and animated serieses have thought about how depressing STAR WARS is, but if they're following Lucas' formula -- high adventure and excitement in battling against fascism -- then they're re-enacting and deepening an element (a flaw?) in the original source material that they won't overturn. The Empire/First Order/alt-right/whatever keeps winning so that these shows and movies can justify more action sequences against the villains.

It's possible that STAR WARS needs to be done with the Empire and find a new villain if it wants to break what Slider_Quinn21 notes is a deeply saddening cycle of the Empire winning and the Rebels scoring points and winning battles but always surviving on the losing end of this eternal war.

I have two avenues of thought on this. The first path: maybe, Slider_Quinn21, you have reached a moment of enlightenment. A personal revelation from arriving at a stage in life that most Americans in Texas never achieve: you have become tired of war.

STAR WARS is fundamentally about deadly armed conflict with mass deaths. It's in the title. And you have become weary of how STAR WARS' wars go on and on and the seemingly decisive battles turn out to be just minor events in one war or the next war. War erodes all victories and deepens all defeats; war grinds away at human beings until they are but cogs in the boundless conflict; war breaks every heroic spirit into a shattered wreck with a mountain of mutilated or lifeless bodies.

That is the nature of war. STAR WARS will always be about wars.

And you have lived out far too many lifetimes of war among the stars whether it's the original trilogy or the prequels or the sequels or the cartoons or the comic books. And you are ready to become a man of peace.

The second line of thinking I have on this is AVATAR: THE LAST AIRBENDER, a series about a small group of ragtag rebels (little children) with superpowers (the ability to 'bend' fire, air, water or earth) travelling across a fascist dystopian empire, trying to find some way to topple the brutal regime. The third and final season ends with a definitive victory for the rebels.

The sequel, THE LEGEND OF KORRA, is set 70 years after AIRBENDER, in a time of sustained peace after the triumph of the original series -- except in the first season, those without bending powers have started to accuse benders of being a regime of genetic supremacists just like the people the benders defeated. The second season delves into how all bending powers could conceivably be combined to unleash an eldritch abomination of evil from the dawn of time. The third season is about a new antagonist seeking to destroy bending powers. The fourth season is about a new threat with an enemy now using technology that can overpower bending abilities.

AIRBENDER was about rebels against a ruling regime; KORRA takes place where the rebels have become the rulers but people are starting to see the rulers as no different from the ones they replaced. AIRBENDER and KORRA and STAR WARS are about people with special abilities that may be used for good or evil with benders/Force users alternatively revered or hated.

AIRBENDER told a war story; KORRA shifted to being about keeping the peace. STAR WARS... has stuck to the war stories.

I get the feeling that Slider_Quinn21 might have preferred it if STAR WARS sequels had gone the LEGEND OF KORRA route.

PS: I'm just kidding about Americans in Texas and I've (over)simplified some of KORRA's plots for readability. May the Avatar forgive me.

It's interesting: there is an action-adventure war series of books called ANIMORPHS, about high school kids who can transform into animals and discover that their planet is slowly being invaded by aliens. They become child soldiers in the war against invasion. The 64 book series was shepherded by Katherine Alice Applegate and a legion of ghostwriters working off her outlines. The series finale ended with a beloved character killed off, one fan favourite mutilated and transformed into an enemy soldier, every survivor traumatized, the villains defeated but surviving, and the end of the war only leading into another war and a cliffhanger ending.

The teenaged readership rioted, furious that Applegate had turned all the characters into psychologically shattered wrecks and ended with the villains not wholly defeated and the beginning of another war. Applegate responded in an open letter, saying:

I think STAR WARS is doing something similar, except that STAR WARS is different from ANIMORPHS in a key area: STAR WARS is completely unaware of how it has effectively become an anti-war parable about the futility and endlessness of war.

ANAMORPHS was deliberately showing war is a relentlessly consuming force of savagery and horror without end by deliberately having no ending; STAR WARS's endless wars are because JJ Abrams was mimicking the formula original STAR WARS war movie and offering a new iteration of the original film and the original war with the repetition being inadvertently depressing. The anti-war implications of the sequel trilogy are completely accidental.

I'm interested.  But I'm mostly interested in seeing what kind of response this ends up being because I think most of Star Wars is a studio reaction to what came before.

George Lucas did his prequels, and they were, especially at the time, ridiculed.  Some of that might have been because George Lucas (and team) thought that people liked Star Wars because of the lightsaber fights.  The prequels ended up being a overly complicated political drama in the Star Wars universe with a lot of lightsaber fights.  Although sentiment has flipped a bit since then, the main thought ended up being prequels=bad and Lucas=finished.

So Disney got their hands on Star Wars and decided to make a new Star Wars film.  Since prequels=bad and Lucas=finished, they got new blood in and went as far away from the prequels as possible.  Instead of trying something new, they redid the original movie.  They leaned on established characters and imagery and got as far away from politics as possible.

And while the Force Awakens was a big hit, people didn't like the fact that it was so close to A New Hope.  So Rian Johnson went with the most non-Star Wars film yet.  Johnson tried to defy expectations and made a movie where the great Luke Skywalker doesn't do much and doesn't believe in the Jedi.  Reception was very mixed and the fanbase was split.

In the meantime, Star Wars had a fun little story with a prequel set during the original trilogy.  Maybe the fans don't love the sequel trilogy but they could create tons of spinoffs.  So they banked pretty heavy on Solo, which they shot twice, and it wasn't warmly received.  Reaction: no more spinoffs.

Then came Rise of Skywalker which went back to the Original Trilogy mold.  Brought back the Emperor and Lando and Darth Vader's helmet and tried to undo and redo as much of Rian Johnson's movie as possible.  And even though people hated The Last Jedi, they really hated Rise of Skywalker.

Then came the Mandalorian.  Again, someone tried to do something new - A Star Wars TV show!  There were things that people liked (Mandalorian armor!  Yoda creature!) but not many lightsabers or Star Wars.  It was a western in the Star Wars universe.  And it was a big hit!  And they brought back Yoda and Boba Fett and a lot of fun stuff.  Reaction - movies are bad.  TV is the future.

So where does Star Wars go from here?  They haven't made a Star Wars movie since Rise of Skywalker, cancelling project after project.  Do they go back to the Original Trilogy well?  Do they try to do something original?  Do they make it like the Mandalorian?  If the first movie does well, will they do more like it?  Keep trying new stuff?  If it does poorly, does it become a one-off?  How much of Rise of Skywalker do they try and undo or ignore?

It will all be very interesting.

*****

From a narrative place, I wonder how they will do it.  We won't be far enough in the future that characters from the Mandalorian will be too old to show up.  If the Mandalorian is the new gold standard for Star Wars, will we see Rey added to those stories?  Will we see Ahsoka?  Ezra Bridger?  Din?  Thrawn?

*****

And like I was saying before, why would Rey's next Jedi school work out any better than Luke's?  Did Luke's school fail because Luke was too devout to the old ways of the Jedi?  Luke implies this but....how?  Was Kylo turned to the dark side because he wasn't allowed to love?  I don't think so.  Kylo had the biggest expectations in the history of the galaxy with a darkness inside him that no one was able to reign in.  It was bad but I don't think the old ways of the Jedi are to blame.  Luke probably should've learned that lesson but he didn't and passed it on to Rey.

But I'm unsure on why I should believe this next school will be better than the last.  Or why anyone in the galaxy should buy into a New New Republic considering what happened to the last two.

I'm not usually one to get overly surprised by anything on TV but man the ending to Ahsoka episode 4 blew my mind just  a bit.

I think watching it would definitely upgrade your experience.  I think the show does a good job of explaining who the characters are at a high level, but you're obviously not going to get a lot of the context if you've never watched Clone Wars or Rebels.  So Ahsoka talks about how she's not a Jedi, but there isn't really any explanation for why she'd say that.  It talks about how she was Anakin's apprentice, but there's no sense for how long / how that relationship developed / where it landed.  So it might be a little like watching A New Hope without watching the prequels (you know Obi Wan was a great Jedi knight, but you don't really know what that means) or even watching The Last Jedi without seeing the original trilogy (you know Luke was great but not what he did to be great).

There are also a couple main Rebels characters (so far) that have appeared.  They're more or less archetypal characters who don't need a ton of explanation.  Hera's a former rebel and a pilot.  Sabine is a Mandalorian with a connection to Ahsoka.  And there's also how Rebels ended - the first two episodes are a retelling of the epilogue of Rebels from Ahsoka's perspective.  So without Rebels knowledge, you're not going to understand who Ezra is or why he was important, you're not going to know who Thrawn is or why he's dangerous, and you aren't going to know how they ended up where they are.

All that to say, I think the show is constructed to be watched by someone who has never seen any of Rebels before with story and character beats that are probably best for people who have been along the entire journey.  And I'm interesting to see how they try to explain (SPOILER) to a general audience without being handwavey or way too involved.

That being said, if you want to get some of that context without watching hundreds of episodes of two cartoons, I've seen lists that will either:

- Cut down Clone Wars and Rebels to only the key arc episodes.  This way you can experience the full feel of both shows without some of the filler or kiddie or irrelevant episodes.

- Cut down Clone Wars and Rebels to just the episodes that are relevant to Ahsoka/Sabine/Hera/Ezra/Thrawn.  Ahsoka isn't in every episode (or even every arc) of Clone Wars, and she's in much less of Rebels.  People have determined which handful of episodes from each show are give you the gist of these characters' journeys without any of the stuff that won't be relevant to Ahsoka.

So depending on your time commitment, you could do either of those.  But honestly, you could also probably watch Ahsoka first and get the context later.

I think the Clone Wars movie is terrible and had the same thought.  I think the first part with the battle scenes is fine?  The kidnapping plot was boring and I was very uninterested.  I think if you look at some of those condensed lists, the movie is either left off entirely, you're told to only watch a certain amount of it, or they include it simply because of character setup.  I don't think anyone in the Clone Wars fandom thinks its good.

And there is a lot of filler episodes, but I never found myself bored or annoyed by the show the way I was bored by the movie.

Regarding your spoiler

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I think it's interesting.  I really like James Gunn's DCU approach.  If a character is going to be in a DCU property (be it animation, live action, or video game), he or she will be voiced by the same actor.  It adds a level of consistency that I appreciate.

That being said, when I watch something that's supposed to be the same thing, I usually defer to the original performer.  So Matt Lanter is an animated Hayden Christensen.  Rosario Dawson is a live-action Ashley Eckstein.  I guess on some level, it's weird that a relationship that started animated with two different actors is now being presented in live action with two different actors, but I guess it'd be the same thing with Ezra and Hera.

I've softened on my whole canon ideology, and since these are both explicitly canon, I think I'm just going to merge it all together in my head.

SPOILERS FOR AHSOKA

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Is it confirmed that the Anakin we see at the end of episode 4 is post-Vader?  Where they are is in the World Between Worlds so past, present, and future are happening at the same time.  The Vader/Ahsoka fight that you referenced is actually a big part of that because Ezra is able to look at the fight as its happening (even though it happened much earlier) and rescue Ahsoka from the fight.  She gets pulled into the future.  That's how the fight ends.

So this Anakin could hypothetically be pre-Order 66, post-Vader, or maybe even some sort of parallel version of Anakin that never went to the Dark Side.

Ahsoka Episode 5 spoilers

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So I don't know enough about Star Wars lore, but Anakin seems to be Force Ghost Anakin in physical form.  So he's definitely post-Vader but different than Force ghosts we've seen before (in that he physically interacts with Ahsoka).  The World Between Worlds hasn't been fleshed out that much so it could be anything.  Anakin is both calm and angry, and he sorta takes Ahsoka to the past (or a vision of the past - it's vague).

What's interesting based on our last conversation is that we actually see young Ahsoka for a decent chunk of the episode.  So Clone Wars Ahsoka.  And here's where I missed Ashley Eckstein the most, but unless they had a child actor mime the dialogue and used Eckstein's voice, I don't know what they could've done.  The voice wasn't exactly right but I thought she did a good job.  This was essentially live action Clone Wars which was cool.