Season Review: Star Wars: Tales Of The Empire
Star Wars:Tales is a very marketing-laden way of saying “Dave Filoni’s written scripts while on his way to his real job”. Alas, that’s how this series is born…Dave’s scratches while he is on his way to work to continue to build out his Star Wars empire. In this case, we get a second season of Star Wars: Tales. Whilst the first season was focused on the Jedi, season two builds out the Empire with animated quarter-hour tales of “did we really need this?” much in the same way Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels did.
Similar to Tales of the Jedi where we got a half-a-dozen short stories featuring Jedi from the Star Wars prequel trilogy era. Tales of the Empire, is set in different eras of the Star Wars timeline, with one path following a young Morgan Elsbeth (voiced by Cathy Ang) and the other following former Jedi Barriss Offee. Across the six NEW Star Wars shorts, we get a gaggle of new and returning voices to the Star Wars legacy including Diana Lee Inosanto as Morgan Elsbeth,Rya Kihlstedt as the Fourth Sister, Wing T. Chao as Governor Wing, Lars Mikkelsen as Admiral Thrawn, Jason Isaacs as the Grand Inquisitor, and Matthew Wood as General Grievous. The characters Darth Vader, Marrok, and Brown’s unnamed Inquisitor from Tales of the Jedi also appear. That said, don’t expect any serious impressions by anyone listed, at best, the villains give us about a minute each.
Charles Murray, Nathaniel Villanueva, and Saul Ruiz return as directors for the Tales of the Jedi shorts with an animated aesthetic that should please the Star Wars animation’s fandom of decades past complete with exquisite fight sequences, strong dialogue, and a clear inclination that the streamer is getting fans excited for the franchise’s future which includes the highly-anticipated The Acolyte, and a litany of other series and feature films to follow. Tales of the Empire does it’s job effectively.
Short of getting Roiland back, which I'm sure isn't going to happen, I don't even think they could get much better than the new voices from the previous season. And the ratings for season 7 weren't much lower on average than for season 6; it was pretty much just a normal season-to-season drop that most likely would have happened regardless.
I mean, look at the actual averages:
Season 1 - 1.57 million viewers Season 2 - 1.97 million viewers Season 3 - 2.33 million viewers Season 4 - 1.52 million viewers Season 5 - 0.96 million viewers Season 6 - 0.56 million viewers Season 7 - 0.42 million viewers
Ever since season 3, it had been having steep drops even with Roiland still involved; the season 6 to 7 drop is actually the smallest-percentage drop it's had since it started dropping, and if anything it's possible that changing the voice actors actually *boosted* interest a bit and prevented it from dropping even more.