Even though the original Star Wars trilogy of films ended 27 years ago, and the prequels completed their run in 2005, George Lucas’ epic franchise continues on in comics, novels, video games, toys and television. And maybe no more so than with Star Wars: The Clone Wars, the animated series that begins its third season on Cartoon Network next Friday night, Sept. 17, with two back-to-back new episodes. (For those who want to catch up, the first season is out on DVD and Blu-ray now, and the second season is set for an Oct. 26 release.) Set between the last two prequels — Episode II: Attack of the Clones and Episode III: Revenge of the Sith — The Clone Wars follows Jedi knights such as Anakin Skywalker (before he crosses over to the dark side and inevitably becomes Darth Vader), his apprentice Ahsoka Tano, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda, as well as a whole mess of Republic clone troopers, as they keep the galaxy safe from Sith lords like Darth Sidious and Count Dooku, the Separatists and their droid army. And since the Star Wars universe is so expansive, the show has found a way to introduce new characters and reintroduce old favorites. “It’s an excellent time to actually have a Star Wars television series because you can touch upon not just those prequel characters, but you can show characters or events that affect things in the future, which is actually the original trilogy,” says Dave Filoni, directing supervisor for The Clone Wars and the man who works with Lucas in keeping Star Wars stories headed in the right direction. Read below for an extended interview with Filoni about the state of Star Wars in 2010 and what’s up with the third season of Clone Wars. (While hardcore fans may know who all these characters are, click the character links if you need to get up to speed via the StarWars.com Databank.) Also, check out this exclusive clip from the “ARC Troopers” episode — featuring the evil General Grievous and the Sith assassin Asajj Ventress — and go here for a clip from the “Clone Cadets” episode, also premiering next Friday.

Art courtesy of Lucasfilm

You’ve taken the Jedi and the Republic clone troopers all over the galaxy. But setting the first two episodes of the third season on the planet Kamino, is this the first time you’ve done a lot with animating water and rain?
Absolutely. Water was a big thing that we just really couldn’t do in the past. We did little drinks and pouring liquids and things like that. [Laughs] But we really developed our own style. One of the things for us to focus on was not to really imitate the properties of water as computer programs can do very lifelike and successfully. We had to come up with stylized ways of imitating water, much like a painter will trick your eye when he paints water. You almost believe it’s moving. We developed those techniques over the first two seasons, experimenting in very small ways until we just decided, well, let’s let go in and really do the water full bore on Kamino, which is an important planet for us because the clones are all from there.

Previous season have dealt with the fact that these clones are more than just carbon copies of one another: They have different ways of being and of fighting and interacting, as well as individual personalities. How hard is animating them with all their little intricacies?
It’s tricky. If they weren’t all the same, we’d have been in big trouble because it would be so hard to produce that many different character models that we’d probably never be able to get the show done. I rely a lot on Dee Baker’s performance as these clones. I never think when I watch the episodes that that’s all one guy doing the voices. Dee’s really great at having a conversation with himself. [Laughs] And of course, we do little paint variations and colors and emblems, but the personality all comes through the voice and the animation of the characters. Ever since “Rookies” in Season 1, which was a big success for us that year, we’ve worked hard at developing the clones. In the movies, they talk about them being very docile and obeying every order, but that’s kind of an idea the Caminoans had of what the clones would be like. We’ve shown that through battle and their interaction with the Jedi that they actually become quite unique and they struggle to become more and more individual as the war progresses. It’ll be interesting to see how that collides with the ending of the Clone War in the future because as we see in Revenge of the Sith, things don’t go so well.

In the first season, there was a lot of time spent with Anakin and Ahsoka and developing that relationship. There are some clones but it’s a lot of Jedi. And you brought in bounty hunters in the second season like Cad Bane, which fosters the old-school fan base like me who grew up with the original movies and characters such as Bossk and IG-88. Going into Season 3, do you try to balance whom you introduce in terms of old and new characters?
They’re all competing for screen time: Cad Bane wants to get on screen, Anakin wants to get on screen, they’re all very big egos. It’s very difficult to get them all the screen time they want. They’re always scene-stealing each other. But no, it’s hard. We always want to introduce new characters, too. What a horrible thing, to have so many interesting things you want to do, I guess. [Laughs] Do we bring in someone like Bossk? That’s a pretty big decision because like you, I grew up and I knew who Bossk was even though he never said a line and his name is never mentioned. So we’ve got all the characters from the old movies who want to get in, and we’ve got characters from the prequels like Plo Koon and these obscure Jedi masters that that younger generation knows as well as we knew Bossk and IG-88. But then there are always new characters like Pre Vizsla and Cad Bane and Hondo that we’ve created for The Clone Wars that need to get their screen time back. In Season 3, we do have some pretty excellent connections to the original trilogy, and this year is the year we start to do that. Probably also because we’ve gotten better at what we do, we’re all a little more confident when we bring in an element from the original Star Wars trilogy that we’ll pull it off in a way that we’re all happy with and that we can appreciate. A lot of the crew is of the generation that grew up with the older films. When we did Boba Fett last year, we took a lot of care to make sure that Boba Fett would be portrayed in a way that lines up with what we imagined him to be in Empire Strikes Back.

What in particular from the original trilogy will be showing up this season?
Oh, man. I would love to tell you but I can’t say. [Laughs] I will say that some of the connections are very clear. It’s not some tiny little nuanced thing where you would have to be in the know, like when I put the Ark from Indiana Jones in one episode of Season 1 in the background. The connections are right up front and are part of the plot. I don’t want to ruin the surprise, but there’s more than one.

Is there some character or some aspect of the original trilogy that fans really want to see in The Clone Wars? Do they want Han Solo or Chewbacca to be in the background in a cantina somewhere?
I get asked a lot of things, and I have gotten asked about the young Han Solo thing. Actually, I’m the big killjoy on that one. It’s not something I really want to do just because I like his character so much and it’s done so great. It’s something I tend to say no to even if it comes up in the story. Some things are best left not in our series and left fresh and exciting in the original. The main thing the fans want to know is what happens to Ahsoka. I get asked that all the time, even though they must know I’m not going to tell them. I get asked a lot about Wookiees, that’s a big one. I’ve always explained that they’re difficult for us to do because of all the hair obviously.

Oh yeah. You think rain’s bad…
Right! The worst thing we could possibly try to do is Wookiees in the rain. That would be very hard. We have gotten some things to work this season. Every now and then, you’ll get to see Anakin and Obi-Wan’s hair actually move, which is a big leap for us stylistically. When the winds blowing now when they’re on speeder bikes, it’s a little more interactive. The fans want more Boba Fett, and we actually had Boba Fett in the series, so that was a good thing. They want everything from very small cameos to very large involvement. Star Wars is so expansive, I could take any one of those subjects and probably do an entire series on it. In the 22 episodes of The Clone Wars every season, we try to cover a lot of it. This year, we get quite into some of the villains this season, like Asajj Ventress, and we learn a lot more about her and the relationship between a Sith apprentice and her master. We’ve shown Ahsoka and her master as a Jedi relationship, but we really haven’t shown that from the opposite. I think fans will be interested to see how that dynamic works.

Ventress has been a character shrouded in mystery. Will she become more of a sympathetic character or is she always going to be this cold, enigmatic assassin?
Her character gets a lot more layers, I’ll put it that way. She’s not as one-dimensional as “I just want revenge and want to kill.” That adds a lot of sophistication. As our series has gone on, we’ve done that with a number of characters. We’ve been able to take obscure characters like one of my favorites, Plo Koon, who’s just a Jedi master who sits in a chair, and a lot of fans have remarked to me on how they feel he’s the equivalent of the Alec Guinness Obi-Wan of the old films. He’s quizzical and will say an obscure saying to Ahsoka, and she’ll learn something. With Ventress, there was a lot of room to grow her character and say, “Well, why is she the way she is? Why isn’t she a Jedi? What’s with all the anger?” Once they find out, fans will have to judge for themselves if they’re sympathetic to her character.

Is the introduction of the horned Savage Opress a present for all the fans who were ticked off that Darth Maul only lasted three-quarters through The Phantom Menace?
[Laughs] I can’t speak to that. It’s of course one of George’s ideas. I think he realizes that everybody really liked Darth Maul, and this is a chance, while it’s not Darth Maul, to explore a similar character in a way we see several different Jedi knights. They’re a really interesting group of people, these horned Zabraks. It’s going to be exciting for people to see this massive Savage Opress. He’s actually a lot bigger and more imposing than Darth Maul. He’s a powerful brute.

It does seem we’re getting more into the Sith mythology, with witches this season and the apprentice-master relationship. Will we see more and more of why this group is the way it is?
Absolutely. That’s something that gets challenged on a lot of levels in Clone Wars Season 3. For the fan who’s watched all six Star Wars films, they’ll start to see some of the machinations of the bigger overall movement that Sidious has, how he has control over the whole Clone War. It’ll become a lot more evident to some of the more hardcore fans as they realize the depths to which the Jedi are really caught in this trap of Palpatine.

Does it do your heart some good when you introduce a character like Cad Bane, who becomes an immediate part of the Star Wars mythos and starts conversations among fans like “Who wins in a fight, Cad Bane or Boba Fett”?
It’s always hard for me to think of it that way because I did have such a hand in making it. I only start to realize it when I see kids running around in Cad Bane Halloween costumes that this is somehow significant to them. When you have your own childhood, you always put those things up on a higher pedestal. I did point to some fans jokingly last year that our little kid version of Boba Fett actually did more damage in our three episodes than he did in the old movies. [Laughs] That was kind of funny, but it lends a lot to the mythos of Boba Fett. We all believed he was the baddest bounty hunter in the galaxy. I always jokingly point that he wasn’t even the one who caught Han Solo — he just said, “Hey, he’s over here,” and Vader came and got him. It never hurt our image of him. Adults seem to love Cad Bane, and kids seem to love him. We won’t really understand what it is we’ve done here probably for another 10-15 years when these kids grow up and are making really elaborate Cad Bane costumes at conventions and still going on about it.

Is there another time period in the mythology you’d like to explore in a similar series, such as pre-Phantom Menace or post-Return of the Jedi?
On a personal level, I would like to see if it was possible to do something involving the Rebel Alliance in the time of the Empire, just because I grew up with that time. There’s something about the super-powerful villain force that they were always running from that was really intriguing, the down-and-out heroes who are barely cobbling it together but doing tremendous tasks like destroying the Death Star. That was a great period, but again, you always have to be careful that you’re not going to take away from it if you go into that area.

I would totally watch a Rebel Alliance show just about Admiral Ackbar. So feel free to do that.
[Laughs] He’s in a trap every week!