Star Wars is back! Star Wars is back!

Of course, the big news from a galaxy far, far away right now is production of J.J. Abrams’ Star Wars Episode VII: Revenge of the Lens Flares. I’m excited for it, to be sure. Cautiously so, but I trust J.J. and his crew to treat Star Wars with the same respect as they did Star Trek. Probably more respect, given how much they tried to copy Star Wars with their two Trek films. So, I’ll definitely be in the theatre next December when it comes.

For now, however, my Star Wars love is reserved unabashedly  for the new Star Wars Rebels animated series. My reservations about Disney taking control of the Star Wars intellectual property have largely been laid to rest by the pilot episode of the new show, “Spark of Rebellion.”

The very best thing about Star Wars Rebels is that it remembers to be fun. This is an action-adventure series, and the writers know it. The balance of pacing, action, character development, humor, and seriousness keeps the show moving while telling a story about complex characters in a tyrannical society. The scale is simultaneously galactic and personal in the same way as the original Star Wars trilogy. When George Lucas first made Star Wars, he made a fun action movie with cool characters. He may have forgotten that over the years, or at least lost sight of what fun and cool are, but the fans remember, and they should be thrilled by what they see on Rebels.

Freddie Prinze, Jr., oddly enough, brings gravitas to Jedi-turned-rogue Kanan Jarrus, the leader of a band of smugglers who resist the Empire as best they can by delivering food and weapons to the oppressed. Ezra Bridger, the 14-year-old street rat of Lothal who meets up with Kanan’s crew, possesses a sense of wonder and amazement while being forced to grow out of his self-centered existence pretty quickly. They both harken back to elements of Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, and Obi-wan Kenobi, not just because they are powerful Force users but because we see in them the same qualities that made those characters so great: enthusiasm, a sense of justice, a good man lurking behind a facade of selfishness, a teacher, a student, rogues, and freedom fighters.

The rest of cast is also fleshed out nicely. There’s Zeb, the Lasat enforcer who comes across as gruff and mean but who is really just looking out for the crew he calls family. Chopper (C1-10PR) fills the role of plucky, underappreciated astromech droid usually reserved for R2-D2, but he’s clearly a lot rougher around the edges.

Then there’s Hera Syndulla, the top-notch Twi’lek pilot of the crew’s suped-up freighter, Ghost, and a bit of a sister or mother figure to Ezra. There’s even some hints that Ghost is a bit more than your run-of-the-mill modified light stock freighter, such as when Kanan gives verbal orders to the ship directly, something not seen in Star Wars to date, to my knowledge.

Sabine Wren is probably my favorite character, a young human girl with Mandalorian roots and a talent for combining artwork and explosives. I want to know more about her and her connection to the group of warriors that spawned  Jango and Boba Fett.

There are hints of the bigger universe of the six (soon to be way more!) Star Wars movies. We get to see the growth and incursion of the Empire into everyday lives. We get to see how people like Han and Chewbacca are living under Palpatine’s regime. The Empire is at the height of its power here, much as it was in the original trilogy. There is a sense of melancholy and despair hanging over everything. Kanan, Hera, and their crew don’t accept the inevitability of the Empire, but there’s a sense that they recognize there are limits to what a small crew can do to resist its evil.

At its heart, that’s what Star Wars was about. That’s why it was a story that mattered. Sure, the Jedi and Sith conflict creates an interesting philosophical debate about the nature of power and control as they relate to good and evil, but the core of Star Wars was that cynicism, superstition, cruelty, and fear can be overcome by mercy, forgiveness, hope, and love. Whether on a grand scale or at a personal level, Star Wars showed us people resisting tyranny and oppression and greed and corruption. Luke’s earnestness and hopefulness and faith in Han breaks through the hardened smuggler’s cynical shell. Han and Leia’s love blossoms even as the darkness tries to snuff out their lives. Luke’s faith in his father and his refusal to give in to his anger redeems even the seemingly irredeemable Darth Vader.

I see hints of that here in Star Wars Rebels. Kanan and his crew show the signs of weary resistance. Ezra lives in a world where he fights every single day for his own survival, so even when he helps others he does so to help himself. When their paths cross, both the Ghost crew and Ezra find their lives and their world views shaken. Kanan, a former Jedi Knight, finds new purpose in training the Force-sensitive Ezra. Ezra finds himself in a larger world fighting for more than himself for the first time, and he likes it. Chopper, Zeb, Sabine, and Hera all learn to accept as a brother the new member of their crew as he proves he’s more than just a self-centered street-thief.

I do have one concern, and that’s the Jedi storyline that they are setting up for Kanan and Ezra. The idea that only Obi-wan and Yoda (and the Skywalker twins) survived the Purge of Order 66 seems a bit ridiculous, and we know Darth Vader helped hunt down the remaining Jedi. But we also know that Luke, Obi-wan, and Yoda are the last by the time A New Hope rolled around. This series, which has started on such a hopeful note, needs to be very careful with how it handles these Jedi. It can’t let them defeat the Empire, but it also can’t have them go down in flames if it hopes to keep its tone. I’m very interested in where it goes, but I hope that it doesn’t dominate the series.

Star Wars has been about hope for a long time. The prequels sort of lost sight of that at times, and I rather lost hope for the Star Wars franchise. (Of course, I never watched Clone Wars, and I hear it was phenomenal.) So seeing Star Wars get back to its roots of plucky resistance fighters standing up to the crushing power of an overwhelming evil gets me very excited. I am feeling optimistic that this spark of rebellion could turn into a new hope.

(Yeah. I went there.)