In 2015, Star Wars changed forever with The Force Awakens, which rebooted the franchise under Disney’s control, launched a new trilogy, and introduced a fresh set of characters who represented the future of Star Wars (at least, at the time). But what a certain type of fan may tell you is that the most important moment in modern Star Wars came one year earlier. That’s because the year 2014 saw the launch of an animated series that quietly turned Dave Filoni into the most important person at Lucasfilm and introduced a cast of characters with way more longevity than Rey, Finn, or Kylo Ren.
On October 3, 2014, the Disney Channel dropped the two-part premiere of Star Wars Rebels, “Spark of Rebellion,” which hit Disney XD two days later. If you didn’t have traditional cable or a costly internet subscription to Disney XD there’s close to zero chance you watched the debut of Rebels in realtime. At this moment, nobody cared about Ezra Bridger, Sabine Wren, Hera, Chopper, Kanan, or Zeb. Yet, the current landscape of Star Wars is influenced by Rebels, perhaps more than any other aspect of preexisting Star Wars media.
Set five years before A New Hope, we now know that the beginning of Rebels was contemporaneous with the events of Andor Season 1. And right there, you’ve got your first example of the influence of Rebels. It was a prequel show about the early days of the Rebellion before it was cool to do such a show. To be clear, tonally, Rebels isn’t anything like Andor, but some of the basic puzzle pieces are similar. The show starts with various rebels in their independent resistance cells, which will eventually coalesce into the Alliance from the classic movies.
Technically speaking, Rebels is also a sequel to The Clone Wars. After Disney purchased Lucasfilm in 2012, the “Expanded Universe” of previous novels, comics random cartoons, and Ewok movies was deemed non-canon with one exception: The Clone Wars. Dave Filoni, the mastermind behind much of The Clone Wars, also put his unique stamp on Rebels, which he co-created with Simon Kinberg.
But crucially, Rebels was sunnier, because it was free of the inevitable bummer-ending of the prequel era. The found family of Rebels was also a bit warmer than the dynamics in The Clone Wars, though aesthetically, Rebels was the first show to essentially take the canon of The Clone Wars forward. Spoiler alert, but the biggest reveal in the first season wasn’t some kind of legacy character like Luke Skywalker, instead, this was when Ahsoka Tano was brought back into the fold. This created a new tradition in Star Wars canon in which we learned there was a lot more going on with prequel characters in the classic era than we ever thought previously.
Rebels also invented the Inquisitors, Dark Side thugs working directly for Darth Vader who were not true Sith but were allowed to have lightsabers anyway. The most obvious live-action result of this can be found in the 20220 series Obi-Wan Kenobi in which the existence of the Inquisitors drives at least half the plot.
And then there’s The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, and Ahsoka. Although all of these shows take place after Return of the Jedi, in a sense, they’re building more on the canon of Rebels than the classic trilogy. The all-important Darksaber may have originated in The Clone Wars, but it had last been seen in Rebels. The famous Mandalorians were also explored at length in Rebels, which gave us the character of Sabine Wren, a cool Mandalorian five years before Din Djarin and Grogu.
Rebels also re-canonized Grand Admiral Thrawn in 2016, a character who had been relegated to “Legends” before being reinvented (slightly) for the show. Thrawn was a big deal in Ahsoka Season 1 and that doesn’t have anything to do with his coolness in the 1990s novels that began with Heir to the Empire. His existence and importance in the current Star Wars canon all started because of Rebels. In 2023, fans were very excited to see several characters from Rebels in live-action in the TV series Ahsoka, but in 2014, nobody knew who these people were.
Essentially, what Rebels did was repopulate the era of the classic trilogy with an alternate set of heroes who were not Luke, Leia, Han, Chewie, and Lando. Instead, the show posited that there were a lot of hard-working Rebellion heroes you just never heard about them because the galaxy is a big place.
This smartly allowed Star Wars to continue to present stories in an era that was very close to the original trilogy without needing to worry about any of the legacy actors. Yes, Leia appears in Rebels a few times, as does Obi-Wan Kenobi in perhaps the show’s greatest moment. But that wasn’t the aim of the series. Instead, Rebels wanted to remake the mythology of the original trilogy while also dumping in a bunch of new toys to play with. When “Spark of Rebellion” debuted, Rebels may have felt inconsequential, or, perhaps, trying a bit too hard. But 10 years later, it’s clear Dave Filoni’s gambit paid off. The Rebellion era and the years that followed have never been the same since Rebels, and the rules that the Star Wars galaxy plays by today were all established in that one moment.
