Lucas Offers Peek at New `Clone Wars'

LAS VEGAS — Fans never seem to get their fill of "Star Wars," and George Lucas is happy to oblige. Lucas offered a glimpse into the latest creation in his sci-fi universe at the theater-owners convention ShoWest on Thursday, showing a sequence from "Star Wars: The Clone Wars," a computer-animated movie due in theaters Aug. 15. It will be followed by a TV series of the same name, to air on the Cartoon Network and TNT this fall. The movie came about as an afterthought while Lucas was developing an animated TV show of the same name. That show debuts this fall, but Lucas figured it was ripe for big-screen treatment, too. "You've got the whole assembly line built, and then you say, `Hey, we can make up something,'" Lucas said in an interview. "It was like old-time moviemaking. What I love about television, it's like Monogram Pictures or the old studio system, where a couple guys come to work and they sit and have some coffee and go, `Why don't we make a movie about such and such? OK, ... (link)