Anna Daniels
If you aren’t watching Star Wars: The Clone Wars, you probably missed one of the best lightsaber fights in the franchise’s history in last Friday’s episode. Ahsoka Tano and Maul clashed on Mandalore, and since executive producer and supervising director Dave Filoni knew that confrontation was a big deal for fans, he wanted to make sure the lightsaber fight was taken to the next level.
So he utilized performance capture technology and brought in Ray Park, the actor who portrayed Maul in The Phantom Menace (and briefly again in Solo: A Star Wars Story), to embody the character one more time. Check out this new featurette that shows how the scene was achieved.
Ahsoka vs Maul Lightsaber Duel Featurette
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k5lHp6g77s?feature=oembed&w=740&h=416]
I’m sure fans will be thrilled to see Ray Park in action once again, and watching this video is a surreal experience for me because I actually got to have my own lightsaber fight with Park himself around the time Solo: A Star Wars Story came to theaters. Solo seemed to set him up to portray the character again in a sequel, but since a follow-up seems unlikely, this could conceivably be the final time that he ever plays the character.
But it’s also super cool to see stunt performer Lauren Mary Kim step back into this universe. Even if you don’t recognize her name or face, you’ve absolutely seen her work before: she’s done stunts for movies like Crank: High Voltage, Furious 7, and Pacific Rim: Uprising, TV shows like Veronica Mars, Luke Cage, and Westworld, and plenty of work for video games, including Kinect Star Wars, Mortal Kombat 11, and PS4’s Spider-Man.
I’ve never seen a full episode of Clone Wars, but after watching this featurette, I fired up Disney+ and skipped ahead to last Friday’s “The Phantom Apprentice” episode just to watch this fight play out in context, and it lives up to the hype. And if you want to learn much more about that episode, participate in fan polls, hear more commentary from the cast and crew, check out concept art of several of the episode’s key moments, learn fun facts and trivia, and explore more about all the major characters who appear in the episode, be sure to head over to StarWars.com’s episode guide page.
The next episode of Star Wars: The Clone Wars arrives on Disney+ on this Friday, May 1, 2020.
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