Rating: ***
Review Date: 3/27/16
Cast: Anthony Daniels, Tom Kane
Divided into four episodes.
After the disappointment of "The Yoda Chronicles" (2014), I was hesitant to watch any more "Lego Star Wars" shows. Thankfully, "The New Yoda Chronicles" is much better and ditches nearly all of the stuff that made the original so awful. Chronologically, these episodes happen between "A New Hope" and "The Empire Strikes Back" as the ghost of Obi-Wan Kenobi attempts to help Luke Skywalker recover some lost holocrons from the Jedi Temple. Naturally, Darth Vader also wants the holocrons, and chases Luke and his friends across the galaxy to find them.
Most notably, the writing is considerably better in these episodes and not nearly as distasteful. Master Builder Jek-14 returns in a minor role and is only mildly annoying, but his character doesn't mesh with the others at all. Emperor Palpatine is gleefully wicked, while a clumsy and luckless Darth Vader does his best to please him. Headstrong Luke continuously gets his friends in and out of trouble, while Yoda and Obi-Wan sit by a fire and clairvoyantly monitor all of the shenanigans. While the rapid-fire "Star Wars" jokes are amusing, the show also manages to sneak in a couple of clever references to "Taken" and "The Terminator." This definitely changes the mindset of the show and targets an older audience instead of just focusing on the 6-10 year old demographic. The biggest disappointment is the soundtrack, which is just a crude compilation of themes from the movies. The cuts are haphazardly abrupt, and hearing classic tracks like "The Asteroid Field" accompanying anything other than the original material is very disconcerting. Apart from that, I enjoyed "The New Yoda Chronicles" quite a bit, and it's a vast improvement over the direction that the series was going.