Dee Bradley Baker Claims That ‘Bad Batch’ Season 3 “Is Sort Of The End of George Lucas’ Legacy,” George Lucas Disagrees

February 14, 2024 ·

John F. Trent

Voice actor Dee Bradley Baker made the bizarre claim that the upcoming Bad Batch Season 3 is “sort of the end of George Lucas’ legacy.”

Emperor Palpatine in a scene from “STAR WARS: THE BAD BATCH”, season 3 exclusively on Disney+. ©.

Baker, who voices the clones in Lucasfilm’s animated shows told ScreenRant, “That actually tracks back to the original idea that George Lucas came up with because this is sort of the end of George Lucas’ legacy is the Bad Batch – he came up with that idea, and it was part of the original Clone Wars series that he made with Dave Filoni…”

He added, “The dynamic that he and the writers came up with was very clear… so that they feel so different, that it was actually easy for me – easier for me – than keeping the clones distinct because they all feel like such different people to me.”

Wrecker in a scene from “STAR WARS: THE BAD BATCH”, season 3 exclusively on Disney+. ©.

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Unfortunately, for Baker, George Lucas made it abundantly clear that Lucasfilm under The Walt Disney Company was no longer creating Star Wars that honored his vision and creation.

Back in 2015, before the release of The Force Awakens, Lucas described The Walt Disney Company as “white slavers” in an interview with Charlie Rose.

Rose posited that the original Star Wars was the moment that changed Hollywood, Lucas replied, “Well, it changed for the good and for the bad. And, it’s again, when you invent things — well, you don’t invent things — when you bring new things into a society you can either — it’s like the balance of the Force — you can either use it for good or you can use it for evil. And what happens when there’s something new people have a tendency to overdo it. They abuse it.”

Lucas elaborated, “Now, there were two things that got abused with Star Wars and still being abused. 1. When Star Wars came out everybody said, ‘Oh it’s a silly movie. It’s just a bunch of space battles and stuff. It’s not real. There’s nothing behind it.’ I said, ‘Well, there is stuff behind it. It’s not just a space battle. There’s more to it than that. It’s much more complicated than that.’ But nobody would listen. So they just said, ‘Well, it’s simple and we like the spaceships. We like the stuff.’ So they said, ‘Fine.’ So the spaceships and that part of the science fantasy, whatever, got terribly abused. And, of course, everybody went out and made spaceship movies and they were all horrible. And they all lost tons of money.”

“And you say, ‘Well, there’s more to it than that. You can’t just go out and do spaceships,” he said.

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Lucas then detailed his second point, “And the other part, which is the technology. Which is, ‘Oh! We’ll just take this new technology. It’s great, especially when it came down later to digital technology where you can really do anything.”

He continued, “And people just abused it all over the place, which they did with color, they did with sound. Whenever there’s a new tool everybody goes crazy and forget the fact that there’s actually a story and that’s the point. You’re telling a story using tools. You’re not using tools to tell a story.”

He then made a third point, “The other thing that got abused — naturally in a capitalist society especially in an American point of view — which is the studios and everything said, ‘Well, wow! We can make a lot of money. This is a license to kill!’ And they did it”

“And, of course, the only way you could really do that is not take chances. Only do something that’s proven. We’ve to remember Star Wars came from nowhere. American Graffiti came from nowhere. There was nothing like it. Now, if you do anything that is not a sequel, or not a TV series, or doesn’t look like one they won’t do it. They say, ‘We want something new…’ That’s the down side of Star Wars and it really shows an enormous lack of imagination and fear of creativity on the part of an industry.”

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He further explained this point, “I mean corporations are not known for — maybe not Silicon Valley — but the old institutions they’re known for being risk averse. And movies are not risk averse. Every single movie is a risk, a big risk.”

“The movie business is exactly like professional gambling except you hire the gambler — usually some crazy kid with long hair who’s like, ‘I don’t get this guy at all.’ You give him $100 million and you say, ‘Go to the tables and come back with $500 million. That is a risk,” he asserted.

“Now, studios don’t even think about it that way,” Lucas stated. “They say, ‘Well, maybe if we told him that he couldn’t bet on red. Maybe if we told him because we did market research and we’ve realized that red wasn’t…’ So they tried to minimize their risk.

“But once you and, of course, you’re hiring the kid to take risks, to be creative, to do things that have never been done before, that have never been tested. You have no idea whether they’re going to work or not. That’s completely the antithesis of what a big, modern corporation is. They want to test things 360 ways. No, you just go out and do it,” Lucas asserted.

Next, he declared, “Some of the worst thing that happens is when they think they know how to do it. Then they start making decisions that ensure that it’s not going to work.”

He then criticized company’s engaging in market research, “Over time a lot of these issues that … they were dimly aware of them have become institutionalized. Now they know that movie will do well in France. This movie will do well in Denmark. This movie you can’t do in Asia. And they’ve got their markets. They know how much of the share they get and they do their little analysis and then they say, ‘We will or will not make the movie.’

“It has nothing do with what I do, which is make a movie something that people can enjoy. It has nothing to do with that. I made money in spite of myself. And I think I made money because I didn’t care. I didn’t care whether it was a hit or not a hit. I wanted to make this movie as a movie. And that’s the thing they won’t do. They can’t do it. It’s not in their constitution to do that.”

He then mimicked a corporate head “‘You know I have a fiduciary duty to come up with the thing. I got 10% a year. My stockholders.’ That’s why I would never go public. And that’s why I said I’m not going to beholden to anybody.’”

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Not only did George Lucas explain how Star Wars had completely strayed from his vision in 2015, he made it even more clear in October 2020 during an appearance at The East Harlem School At Exodus House as part of the Virtual Speaker Series.

Lucas was asked by 7th grader Jeremiah, “The world has changed so much since the first Star Wars movie, how do you think the changes in the fight for racial justice will impact the Star Wars universe going forward?”

The filmmaker responded, “I don’t know, I mean. I kind of lost control of Star Wars, so it’s going off in a different path than what I intended.”

He added, “But the first six [Star Wars films] are very much mine and my philosophy. And I think that philosophy sort of, goes beyond any particular time, because it’s based on history, it’s based on philosophy, it’s based on a lot of things.”

What do you make of Baker’s claim?

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Author: John F. Trent

John F. Trent was a prior editor of That Park Place. He is host of the YouTube channel The Trent Report as well as the stock racing focused YouTube Channel John Trent Racing . Mr. Trent is founder of Bounding into Comics and left That Park Place on November 8th to focus on a Substack strategy with FandomPulse.