Star Wars: The Clone Wars

2003hashtag campaignclassic

Published September 29, 2026

Star Wars: The Clone Wars is an animated franchise spanning a 2003 Tartakovsky micro-series, a 2008 theatrical film, and a long-running Dave Filoni show that Disney revived in 20181. When Lucasfilm surprised Comic-Con with the revival trailer, fans flooded Twitter with the #CloneWarsSaved hashtag, turning a cancellation grievance into one of the most celebrated fandom victories of the year3.

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Overview

The franchise fills the gap between Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, following Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi through the galaxy-wide war. Genndy Tartakovsky's 2003 take used flat, angular 2D animation and ultra-short episodes, five minutes in season one and twelve in season two, earning the label micro-series3. Dave Filoni's 2008 continuity threw out that look for CG animation with a new protagonist, Anakin's padawan Ahsoka Tano, and ran 121 episodes across six seasons1.

Critics were rough on the theatrical launch, with the Rotten Tomatoes consensus calling the film a pale shadow of the franchise4. The Filoni TV series pulled the opposite reception over time, and its cancellation after season five became a running fandom grievance that fed directly into the #CloneWarsSaved moment years later3.

Origin & Background

Platform
Cartoon Network (origin) / Twitter (viral fan campaign)
Key People
Genndy Tartakovsky, Dave Filoni
Date
2003

Star Wars: The Clone Wars traces back to November 3rd, 2003, when Cartoon Network premiered Tartakovsky's animated micro-series3. The 2008 continuity began with the theatrical Star Wars: The Clone Wars film on August 15th, 2008, followed by the TV series on October 3rd, 20083. Filoni's show ran on Cartoon Network for five seasons before a truncated sixth season was shunted to Netflix in 2014, and an unfinished arc was later reworked into Star Wars Rebels1.

The meme-adjacent moment landed on July 19th, 2018, when a Comic-Con panel marking the show's tenth anniversary ended with a surprise announcement of a new twelve-episode season for Disney's upcoming streaming service1. The trailer dropped the same day and pulled more than three million views inside 24 hours2.

How It Spread

Reaction to the 2018 revival was immediate on Twitter. Fans latched onto #CloneWarsSaved as the rallying tag, with user @JasonBivona3 posting a screengrab captioned "it's back baby, the clone wars is back #CloneWarsSaved," which drew more than 450 retweets and 2,200 likes within a day3. Star Wars fan account @TheSWU paired the 2013 #SaveTheCloneWars campaign artwork with the 2018 #CloneWarsSaved tag in a side-by-side, gathering more than 500 retweets and 1,500 likes3.

Coverage jumped from fan Twitter into press outlets quickly. Ars Technica framed the reveal around Filoni's chance to finish the story, quoting him on the personal weight of putting the final pieces in place1. The revival trailer's three-million-view spike in a single day made the Disney streaming pitch, still unnamed as Disney+ at the time, a Comic-Con headline12.

The seventh season eventually aired on Disney+ in 2020, closing out arcs like the Siege of Mandalore, and the franchise stayed watchable on the service afterward, where the film and both TV runs are still stocked45.

How to Use This Meme

Fans typically use #CloneWarsSaved to celebrate a franchise reversal or to piggyback new Star Wars announcements on the goodwill of the 2018 revival moment. The hashtag is often paired with screenshots of Ahsoka, Rex, or Anakin from the Filoni series, and it's commonly used alongside references to the earlier #SaveTheCloneWars push from 20133.

Frequently Asked Questions