Star Wars: The Clone Wars

Despite what I’m about to say, I want to start off by saying this show is brilliant, and I’m picky. Many view this show as a kids show, it’s absolutely not. Common sense wrote their review based off of season 1, which is very light hearted and just contains droids being destroyed for the most part. If you do not know, there are 7 seasons of this show, starting season 2, the violence ramps up a lot. The show is not designed for young children. Violence is very frequent, characters are murdered in cold blood on screen, characters necks are crushed with them sophisticating and sound affects of their necks being crushed, assassins and bounty hunters snap necks, shoot, and tear apart characters, dark elements occur such as for there to be balance good and evil must exist. Also how body count of humans and other characters being shot, heads being sliced off, on screen torture, and a lot more. I’m only on season 3 out of 7, and even though I’m an adult and handle rated R and tvma shows all the time, this show is simply not made for children. Not to mention strippers are introduced briefly and erotic dancers, drinks that have the same affect as alcohol, and I hear the later season only get more intense. Again, this show is absolutely brilliant, but contains more violence then any Star Wars movie ever made including episode 3 even though it’s a cartoon. 13 is the minimum age I recommend, it just has too dark of messages to be put in a child’s mind. The politics and the writing of the show is all far too complicated for kids to understand anyways. If you plan on watching it with your child, skipping through violence or racy scenes is pointless because of how frequent they are. Just be careful, but if your a teen or an adult, don’t let the first half of season 1 fool you into thinking it’s for kids, the writing quickly gets dark.

I watched several of these with my seven year old and was sorry I did. It is a great Star Wars show but many episodes have concepts that aren’t appropriate for younger kids. One of the many examples is season 3, episode 13 “Monster”, about the creation of Savage Opress. An evil sect of witches is selecting a man from a clan of brothers to become their warrior servant. The man competes against his brothers for the “honor” and all but one brother dies in the process. The winner offers himself in exchange for his remaining brother’s life and the brother is spared. But then the witches cast spells to make the winner into Savage Opress, a powerful warrior. To confirm his allegiance after the transformation, he is commanded to kill the spared brother. He does it without hesitation.