#jay shuster

You'll never believe you who it was....

JAY SHUSTER! 😱

Happy Clone Wars Friday!

This week’s theme: Siblings!

Of course the biggest and most tragic group of siblings in Star Wars is the clone army. Jay Shuster, one of the designers behind this creepy space, said:

“In time, the clone facility designs adopted their strongest and most apparent theme -- vast amounts of white space with strong graphic elements. It instantly conveyed the sterile conditions and eerie calm of the facility... We had to struggle with the bad design mojo of monotony and repetition. The battle for a solution had many forms: making the space ultra-huge, populating it with thousands of clones, and creating elements to break up the vastness and repetition without screwing up the overall scale.”

Designer Edwin Natividad researched “concepts of the symmetry naturally occuring in physics and nature” to achieve a sense of precision for “the mathematical minds of the Kaminoans, a species that may be pure science incarnate.”

These artistically challenging ideas of repetition, sterility, and Kaminoan culture were visually explored in Attack of the Clones and some other early clone-focused media, such as Genndy Tartakovsky’s Clone Wars series, but they have largely been replaced by an emphasis on individual personalities and Mandalorian culture in the computer-animated series, books, and general fandom. I think it would be more interesting to return to the disturbing, cynical origin of the clones, to really embrace the sci-fi horror of their creation and doom, than to go in the upcoming Bad Batch show’s individualistic action-adventure direction. Militarism is a scary, dehumanizing force, after all, and it would be compelling to see Star Wars take that aspect of its tragedy more seriously.