Changes coming to 'Clone Wars'

Dave Filoni, 36, supervising director of "Star Wars: The Clone Wars," promises lots of character development in its third season, which begins Friday on the Cartoon Network.

In the opening scroll of the 2005 film "Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith," it says, "There are heroes on both sides. Evil is everywhere."

"I can say that this season, we're going to get into that a lot more," Filoni said. "I think it's a necessary point of the Clone Wars. And the audience will have a much better understanding of what the Clone War really is when we're done with Season 3."

Filoni talked about the new season at Celebration V, the mega "Star Wars" convention last month in Orlando.

In the series, the good guy Jedi commanders -- Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker -- and their clone troops fight against the droid armies of the evil renegade Jedi Count Dooku. Other major characters include Anakin Skywalker's apprentice, or "padawan," Ahsoka Tano, and the clone leaders, Captain Rex and Commander Cody.

It was filmmaker George Lucas' idea to create Tano.

"George came right in and said, 'I want Anakin to have a padawan. We're going to use this girl here. We'll call her Ahsoka.' It was just something he wanted to explore," Filoni said. "We see her evolve and mature."

"She is the elected ruler of what was a warlike society that is trying, for its own survival, not to be what they were -- to fight against this instinct to be warriors," he said.

Filoni's parents introduced him to science fiction and fantasy at a young age.

"My mother always had 'Lord of the Rings' around when I was a kid. She'd sit up and read me 'The Hobbit.' She had books like 'Childhood's End' [by Arthur C. Clark]. She had 'Dune' [by Frank Herbert]."

His earliest memory of the original "Star Wars," seen at 4, was "sitting in the back of our car, pretending to shoot the other cars like they were TIE fighters," he said. "My brother was Han, and I was Luke." He played with a Death Star Space Station set with foam blocks and a crank to make the trash compactor work.

He's fond of the clones, especially Captain Rex, who reports to Anakin Skywalker.

He and Lucas have discussed going further into the individual personalities of the clones.

"Anakin factors into that with Rex because he's different for a Jedi, so you have to think that his clone commander, his captain, would be different by being a friend of his," he said.