Ashley Eckstein’s Bold Claim About ‘The Clone Wars’ Is the Star Wars History Lesson the Fandom Needs Right Now

It is easy to look at the current state of Star Wars and assume it was always destined to become the sprawling multimedia empire it is today. Disney+ series, theatrical films, animated spinoffs, and interconnected storylines stretching across decades of galactic history have become so routine that the franchise’s modern dominance can feel almost inevitable. That sense of certainty, though, obscures a genuinely precarious chapter in Star Wars history that many fans have already forgotten.

Six years after its finale, ‘Star Wars: The Clone Wars’ remains the creative foundation for a huge portion of modern Star Wars storytelling, from ‘The Mandalorian’ to ‘Ahsoka.’ Several of the most prominent Disney-era projects, including ‘The Mandalorian’, ‘The Book of Boba Fett’, ‘Obi-Wan Kenobi’, ‘Ahsoka’, and ‘The Bad Batch’, can be directly linked to the influence that ‘The Clone Wars’ had on the franchise. The animated series did not just fill in prequel-era gaps. It helped write the playbook for everything that came after.

That is exactly the point Ashley Eckstein made during a reunion panel for the ‘Clone Wars’ cast at MCM Expo in London this past weekend. The panel brought together cast members including Eckstein, Dee Bradley Baker, James Arnold Taylor, Matt Lanter, Cat Taber, and Nika Futterman, who took to the stage to share stories and answer fan questions.

Speaking about the series’ place in franchise history, Eckstein offered a reminder of just how different things looked when the show first aired. “For us, it’s easy to forget, but when ‘Clone Wars’ was on the air, there was no other Star Wars. We thought Star Wars was done. This was before Disney bought it and we were the only thing on the air. Without the success of ‘Clone Wars’ we might not be seeing ‘Mandalorian’, Boba Fett, etcetera.”

According to GeekTyrant, there was a time when the people working on ‘Star Wars: The Clone Wars’ genuinely believed they were carrying the torch for a franchise that had reached the end of the road. Hearing Eckstein frame it that way makes the show’s legacy land differently. The animated series was not just a side project filling time between live-action releases. It was, for a stretch, the entire living version of Star Wars.

The series was overseen by Dave Filoni, who worked closely with George Lucas during its production, and Filoni has since become one of the franchise’s most influential creative voices, with much of his storytelling approach traceable directly back to lessons learned on ‘The Clone Wars’. Characters like Ahsoka Tano, Bo-Katan Kryze, and Saw Gerrera, all introduced in animation, have since become cornerstones of the live-action era.

Even ‘The Mandalorian and Grogu’, which is now playing in theaters, carries DNA from those animated stories, with fan-favorite Zeb Orrelios from ‘Rebels’ appearing in a supporting role and future connections to ‘Ahsoka’ already being teased. ‘Ahsoka’ Season 2 is currently the only live-action Star Wars series in development, with Filoni’s broader Star Wars film also in the pipeline to close out this chapter of the franchise’s saga.

Eckstein voiced Ahsoka Tano across the full run of ‘The Clone Wars’ and has watched the character grow from a controversial new face in 2008 into one of the most beloved figures in the entire franchise. Her perspective on what the show meant during those uncertain years carries real weight, especially as Lucasfilm continues to build on the foundation that animated era created. The MCM panel also carried an emotional undercurrent, with the cast honoring the late Tom Kane, the voice of Yoda and narrator of every ‘Clone Wars’ episode, who passed away just days before the event.

Whether or not fans fully agree with how interconnected modern Star Wars has become, Eckstein’s reminder that none of it may have existed without ‘The Clone Wars’ is worth sitting with. Do you think ‘The Clone Wars’ deserves more credit as the backbone of modern Star Wars, or has the franchise grown far enough beyond its roots that the animated era’s influence is sometimes overstated?