Ladies and gentlemen and whatever Darryn is…. Grand Admiral Thrawn is officially joining the new Star Wars universe! It had been rumoured for some time, but it was finally made official during the Star Wars Rebels panel at Star Wars Celebration when a brand new trailer for the show’s upcoming season 3 was revealed.
Check it out below!
Holy crap! Just when I thought Rebels couldn’t improve on an already incredible second season, they go and show us this! Blind Kanan, Ezra being drawn more and more to Dark Side, Imperial Mandalorians, Wedge Antilles being introduced, and then finally Thrawn! What’s more, Thrawn will be voiced by Lars Mikkelsen, brother of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story actor Mads Mikkelsen!
And if you’re wondering what the big deal is with Thrawn, then let me give you a bit of a history lesson:
When the Star Wars Expanded Universe material was scrapped a few years back in favour of a new, more comprehensive and controlled Star Wars universe, many fans were justifiably upset. For years, while we had no new Star Wars movie, it was the books, comics and video games of the EU where the best (and for a long time, only) work was being done, and to have all that essentially relegated to glorified fan fiction was a tough pill to swallow.
Lucasfilm and Disney had valid reasons for ditching the EU though, as the fact that it had already covered so much of the timeline before, after and between the movies meant that they had no narrative room to maneuver when it came to the new movies. What they also said though was that they weren’t idiots – the EU had provided so many incredible characters and stories that they would definitely not be ignoring it all and would be borrowing from it wherever it fit into their plans. But that hasn’t really happened… Until now.
Prior to us finding out what The Force Awakens was all about, if you were to ask any hardcore fan which story he/she would like to see adapted for the screen, there’s a pretty good chance it would be The Thrawn trilogy, Timothy Zahn’s series of novels featuring Grand Admiral Thrawn, arguably the greatest villain the Star Wars universe has that’s not named Darth Vader. Thrawn is an alien, which makes him an oddity in the generally human prejudiced Empire. But he rose as high as he did due to an incredible talent for military strategy and reading his opponents. He’s cold, calculating, merciless and just one plain cool son of a gun, who in the EU almost singlehandedly brought the Rebellion to its knees.
And you will get to meet him when Star Wars Rebels returns in the third quarter of 2016.
Last Updated: July 16, 2016
