With the Star Wars franchise now more than 45 years old, many of the fans who were kids when the Original Trilogy came out are well into their 50s. I’m sure that’s a big part of the reason why Lucasfilm, under its current parent company Disney, is continually making efforts to have the Star Wars saga appeal to a new generation of consumers.
Enter Star Wars: Young Jedi Adventures, the new animated series that premieres today (May the 4th) on Disney+ and Disney Junior, after having released a handful of shorts as primers last month.
Young Jedi Adventures takes place during the High Republic era of the larger Star Wars timeline (established in recent books and comics from Lucasfilm publishing), a couple hundred years before the events of the Skywalker Saga. The show focuses on three youngling Jedi initiates– Kai Brightstar (voiced by Jamaal Avery Jr.), Lys Solay (Juliet Donenfeld), and the adorable Nubs (Dee Bradley Baker, best known to Star Wars devotees as the male clones of Jango Fett in The Clone Wars and The Bad Batch animated series). These young students of the Force are relocated by their adult Master Zia Zanna (Nasim Pedrad from Disney’s Aladdin live-action remake) to a Jedi Temple on the planet Tenoo, to which they are transported by the similarly-young pilot with her own ship Nash Durango (Emma Berman). When I reviewed the above-mentioned shorts last week, I noted that it was odd that Nash was permitted to run her own transport business and that the younglings were so frequently going off on adventures by themselves, but those peculiarities are at the very least addressed, if not quite entirely explained, in the first full-length episode of the series.
What I mostly tried to do while checking out the first few episodes of Star Wars: Young Jedi Adventures for the purposes of this review was put myself in the shoes of its target audience– namely children around the ages of 4 through 8 or so. The cartoon from my own childhood that most closely matches the tone and spirit of adventure of this series would be Muppet Babies, and I’d say Young Jedi Adventures is a pretty successful attempt at generating the same kind of thrills and laughs I got from that show in the 80s. Even as a 40-something-year-old adult I had fun watching Nash, Nubs, Lys, and Kai go through a variety of challenges, some of which have bigger stakes than others. These stories are often broken up into two separate installments per 24-minute episode, and sometimes involve conflicts with an also-youthful pirate named Taborr Val Dorn (Trey Diaz Murphy) and his gang. Other adventures include a river-skiff race against Nash’s wealthy rival, a quest to find the lost ship of an ancient navigator, and an expedition to heal Nubs from a cold so he can witness the once-a-year eruption of a geyser. So that’s the kind of playful stuff we’re talking about here– nothing terribly life-threatening, although as I mentioned earlier these underage, inexperienced characters do regularly find themselves out on their own without any adult supervision. If you’re okay with that as a parent, I can’t imagine any kid wouldn’t immediately fall in love with these Jedi-in-training as they go through their colorful, kinetic experiences in A Galaxy Far, Far Away.
The first season of Star Wars: Young Jedi Adventures is now streaming via Disney+ and airing on Disney Junior.