The live-action debuts of Ahsoka Tano and Bo-Katan Kryze in The Mandalorian Season 2 mark a major turning point for modern Star Wars. On a surface level, it's wonderful to see so many animated characters receive a much-deserved spotlight for a larger audience. Yet more importantly, their appearances mean that The Mandalorian has officially gone from alluding to the canonicity of Star Wars animated shows like The Clone Wars and Rebels to confirming that they are indeed part of the main saga's storyline, which is a very big deal.

That's not to say that Star Wars characters never make the jump from animation to live-action before. On the contrary, this trend has been happening since 1978 when Boba Fett first appeared in an animated "show within a show" segment of the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special. The story was clearly not meant to be canon – indeed everyone who's ever watched or participated in the Holiday Special prefers to ignore its very existence – but it ultimately built some level of hype for the bounty hunter years before he became a fan-favorite character in The Empire Strikes Back. It also weirdly gave Fett more lines and personality than the entirety of his screen time in the original trilogy.

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General Grievous dueling several Jedi at once in Star Wars: Clone Wars

Decades later, Genndy Tartakovsky's 2003 microseries Star Wars: Clone Wars took a more serious approach to tying film and animation together. Unlike the Holiday Special or Droids and Ewoks cartoons, Clone Wars was meant to be semi-canonical, offering a glimpse into the events of its titular galactic conflict and how this affected Anakin's growth as a Jedi Knight, all conveyed through Tartakovsky's highly-stylized action choreography. The show even featured the debut of essential prequel-era characters like General Grievous, whose 2-D portrayal as a Terminator-like behemoth capable of defeating multiple Jedi simultaneously is often held in higher regard than Grievous' actual movie persona. Watching Clone Wars wasn't necessary to understand the prequels, but it was still an enjoyable continuity bridge for those curious about what transpired between films.

In 2008, Dave Filoni's Star Wars: The Clone Wars series complicated things due to how much of the Clone Wars was retconned character-wise. Ahsoka being Anakin Skywalker's secret Padawan and Darth Maul's revival were only the most notable examples, yet their inclusion added much emotional weight and complexity to an underexplored part of Star Wars history. Then Disney bought Lucasfilm in 2012, resulting in a complete narrative overhaul where the Extended Universe storylines were kicked out and The Clone Wars officially became part of the chronology. Suddenly a new issue emerged: How to make this animated timeline work for audiences either unfamiliar with The Clone Wars or who saw it as awkwardly playing adjacent to Star Wars' main franchise entries?

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Enter Saw Gerrera, a young guerrilla fighter from one of Clone Wars Season 5's storylines. 2016's Rogue One: A Star Wars Story brought Gerrera to live-action, where he -- now a grizzled extremist -- was played by Forest Whitaker. For longtime animation fans, Saw symbolized something radical: The first official character from The Clone Wars to transition into live-action.

Whittaker later reprised his role as Gerrera for Star Wars Rebels and Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. However, Rebels also took the live-action/animation overlap further by reintroducing characters like Ahsoka, Captain Rex and Maul into its storylines about the Disney-era Rebel Alliance. This was then followed up by a brief Maul appearance in Solo: A Star Wars Story and both Ashley Eckstein and Freddie Prinze Jr. having voice cameos as Ahsoka and Kanan Jarrus, respectively, in The Rise of Skywalker's climax. Everything was now linked or interconnected in some shape or form.

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In this respect, The Mandalorian marks the culmination of Disney tying Star Wars live-action to animation. While Season 1 did tie into the animation with its reveal Moff Gideon had the Darksaber, Season 2 essentially saw Din Djarin and Grogu/Baby Yoda Forrest Gumping their way into meeting some of the animated series' most beloved characters. They didn’t just meet Ahsoka and Bo-Katan, but actively participated alongside them in storylines that continued where The Clone Wars and Rebels left off. Yet what makes those stories work is how little the titular Mandalorian cares about them whatsoever, often providing aid entirely because they can help him protect Baby Yoda. Thus, even as The Mandalorian remains accessible, the explicit name dropping of Grand Admiral Thrawn and Nite Owls allowed fans to better comprehend how much this show directly references its animated past.

If The Mandalorian's finale is any indication, the animated and live-action portions of the Star Wars universe are now more closely linked than ever before. Not only is Djarin stuck in the middle of a political conflict that originated from the cartoons, but Ahsoka's upcoming series will likely tie into Rebels' final mystery. Plus, The Bad Batch trailer even featured an appearance by Mandalorian character Fennec Shand. Watching all these series may still not be required to understand the others, but their overarching connection to modern Star Wars lore is no longer hypothetical.

Created by Jon Favreau, The Mandalorian stars Pedro Pascal, Gina Carano, Carl Weathers and Giancarlo Esposito. Seasons 1 and 2 are now streaming on Disney+.

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