You don’t need to watch The Clone Wars to enjoy Ahsoka (but it’ll help)

The third season of The Mandalorian is currently airing on Disney+, but Lucasfilm is already looking forward to the next Star Wars TV show: Ahsoka, which will premiere in August.

Ahsoka will follow ex-Jedi Ahsoka Tano (Rosario Dawson) as she searches the galaxy for Grand Admiral Thrawn, a villain who featured prominently in the animated show Star Wars Rebels. Before that, we first met Ahsoka Tano as a padawan learner training under Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars: The Clone Wars.

So even though she’s never had her own show, Ahsoka has a lot of history behind her. Can fans jump into the new series without seeing the old? “We never want to create a situation where you feel like you have to have seen these things because then you’re missing out,” producer Dave Filoni told IGN. “I don’t know how fans feel, but – do you have to have seen The Clone Wars to understand Ahsoka? No, you don’t have to have seen that.”

"Does it help, will you know more and understand more? Sure. But it’s not – if you haven’t checked it out, but you can, thanks to Disney Plus, it’s right there. We picked up A New Hope at Episode 4, right? So Star Wars, to us, we came in in the middle of it. So there is a kind of history in Star Wars of just diving right into the story. So I really do dive right into the story with Ahsoka, but I know more about it because of the work of The Mandalorian."

So no, you don’t have to watch the earlier series to enjoy Ahsoka, but if you want to, you can see them on Disney+. Hint hint.

Star Wars: Ahsoka show will welcome new and old fans alike

Natasha Liu Bordizzo, who plays Mandalorian warrior Sabine Wren, agreed that the show is accessible. “Well there’s just so much history with these characters, so there’s just so much subtext, which is very unique to this show because there is an existing fanbase, and then there’s also a whole bunch of fans that are completely clueless right now that will become fans,” she told Collider. “So we had to cater to both, so the writing was very specific in doing so, and giving away enough that it’s an homage to what the fans already know, but not being so cryptic that new fans can’t understand it. So it was a very interesting balance to strike.”

Sabine is another character introduced in a prior show, in this case Rebels. So the history is piling up. We’ll see if fans get buried under it when Ahsoka premieres on Disney+ in August.

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