The Official Episode Guide: Season 1 (Star Wars: The Clone Wars) Paperback – Import, 29 October 2009

I have recently watched Season One of The Clone Wars on DVD while, at the same time, reading The Official Episode Guide to see if I missed anything while I was watching. The DVDs are wonderful, and it has been great fun to watch the episodes again after seeing them originally on TV. Each episode includes a featurette showing director Dave Filoni and other key members of the production team talking about the development of the episode. All were very interesting. Also, a few of the episodes are presented as director's cuts, so they show some footage we have not seen before. Great fun. The package also includes a booklet showing drawings and pictures.The Official Episode Guide is also very useful. Each episode is covered separately with a synopsis, pictures, background information, and lists of the cast, characters, weapons, and vehicles. I found the book to be helpful if you read about each episode after watching them on the DVD.Then there is the Character Encyclopedia for Clone Wars. The book covers more than 200 characters and gives you a description, statistics, a picture, and specific background information for each. The characters are listed in alphabetical order so you can always look up a particular one you might be interested in. As is true with most Clone Wars items, the book has a great look to it.I am pleased that The Clone Wars series has been successful enough to spawn all of the books and the DVDs that have been issued. The quality of the packaging has been excellent, and I am optimistic that we have a great deal more to look forward to.

This episode guide is very nicely done. Colourful, lots of photos, behind-the-scences info, and provides more than just a simple recap of the stories. I hope they do one for the second season!

This book is great fun, and the illustrations are top-notch, but it really doesn't give much detail about the show, and sadly, most of the better tidbits are farmed from the DVD shorts that accompany each episode on the Season 1 DVD -- so if you have that -- and I'm guessing very few people who bought this book didn't also get the DVD -- aside from some excellent pictures, you sort of don't need this book. I still like it, but you can get most or all of the information elsewhere.

As an adult fan of the Clone Wars I love this guide. It is an excellent value for the money, offers lots of tidbits of info. Must have if you get the DVD set or just a casual fan.

This guide not only summarizes each episode in the first season, but also provides a retcon of some sort for each. For example, they explain why the Ruusan system isn't better-known, why the battle droids are depressingly stupid, etc. It's a good value as well, although the production standards aren't great (for example, accidentally inserting the wrong episode opening narration or a quote from a different episode on the wrong page).