5 Clone Wars spin-offs Star Wars could do next

Now that The Clone Wars has ended, and most of our wacky fan theories were proven wrong (other than Vader!) it's time to make all our Star Wars dreams come true again. Just because The Clone Wars have ended doesn't mean the Star Wars animated galaxy has to stop. All of this can keep going!

We're not saying there should be a Clone Wars Season 8 — that would be weird since the actual Clone Wars are, in fact, over — but are several creative ways to create Clone Wars spinoffs that wouldn't require the casual viewer to have seen every single episode. With so much love for this aspect of Star Wars right now, it would be almost stupid if Lucasfilm didn't cook-up a follow-up.

With that in mind, here are five Clone Wars spin-offs that the finale basically sets up and Lucasfilm should totally make next.

Light spoilers for The Clone Wars finale ahead.

5. Clone Wars: Darth Maul's Bogus Journey

A series centered on the exploits of Darth Maul (technically just "Maul" now) would be sick.

When Maul was brought back to life in Season 4 of The Clone Wars way back in 2012, count me among those who was super-skeptical about his resurrection. For anyone who hadn't seen The Clone Wars or Rebels, Maul was memorable, but one-off baddie, slickly sliced by Obi-Wan Kenobi in The Phantom Menace.

And yet, The Clone Wars revealed George Lucas seemingly always planned to bring him back, and in 2018's Solo: A Star Wars Story, Maul's shocking appearance in a Star Wars version of a post-credits scene was not only bizarre but seemed to promise that there were a lot more stories to tell about this horned, tattooed, double-bladed lightsaber-wielding badass.

Look, we know Maul will eventually be killed by Obi-Wan Kenobi on Tatooine a short time before the events of A New Hope. But about nine years pass between the ending of The Clone Wars and his appearance in Solo. That's a lot of time for Maul to rebuild his crime syndicates, but also, have all sorts of other evil adventures.

4. Clone Wars: The Way (Mandalorian Origins)

Okay, so despite the fact that a ton of Mandalorians appeared in Season 7 of The Clone Wars, we didn't get any closer to understanding how these prequel-era Mandos connect with the sect we see throughout The Mandalorian. Specifically, we're still in the dark on the origin of the honor code known as "the Way" that pervades all the Mandalorians in the time after Return of the Jedi.

We know Din Djarin was rescued by Mandalorians during the Clone Wars because we saw a flashback where Battle Droids try to kill him as a little kid. So it stands to reason that that specific sect of Mandalorians was practicing "The Way" even though every single other contemporary Mandalorians we see in The Clone Wars and Rebels do not.

So who are these Mandalorians? Do they connect with some of the Mandos we've seen in The Clone Wars? We're all about the Way, but it would be even better if we were shown the Way... to some answers.

3. Clone Wars: Clone Pilots

When we talk about Order 66, we tend to focus on the Clone Troopers who turned on their Jedi Generals, but, for some reason, virtually nobody talks about the Clone Pilots.

In Revenge of the Sith and The Clone Wars, it's pretty clear the Clones aren't just created for ground infantry; they occupy all sorts of roles in the Grand Army of the Republic. You've got Clone starship officers, Clone mechanics, and even, I assume, Clone janitors. Of all of these, the Clone Pilots are the most interesting, because it seems like their role in the Empire would be fairly secure.

Sure, like Stormtroopers, by the time of the classic trilogy, most Imperial infantry and pilots have been replaced by "regular" recruits. But what happened to all these Clone Pilots? Were they good pilots? Could they have started their own mini-civil war because they were so good at flying spaceships? Did any of these guys defect to the Rebellion, even with their inhibitor chips still working?

In Revenge of the Sith, Obi-Wan speaks affectionally to "Oddball," a Clone Pilot in his squadron. Anakin seems worried about the Clone Pilots, too. Let's see more of them!

2. Clone Wars: An Ahsoka Anthology Series

Like Maul, Ahsoka also has a lot of life that happens to her in between the ending of Clone Wars and the beginning of Rebels. But, unlike Maul, Ahsoka also survived well beyond the events of the original trilogy. In fact, we're expecting her to appear as a live-action character in The Mandalorian Season 2, played by Rosario Dawson. The thing is about all of this is that doing an Ahsoka series set in one time period is sort of wasted potential. A new series focused on Ahsoka could be a lot more interesting if it told self-contained stories that didn't have to exist in any kind of linear order. In some senses, Star Wars has done this before, with Forces of Destiny. The difference there is simple: Those episodes were pretty short and mostly aimed at very young children.

If you did an Ahsoka anthology series aimed at older viewers, we could get everything from her earliest days as a Padawan, right up until the moment just before she crosses paths with The Mandalorian.

1.Star Wars: Underworld — The Animated Reboot

The Clone Wars wasn't the first ambitious post-prequels Star Wars series overseen by George Lucas. In the years just after Revenge of the Sith was released, Lucas planned an epic series called Star Wars: Underworld, which explored the criminal element of Courscant, gave Sheev Palpatine a crime boss lady friend, and 100 percent featured Darth Vader busting some heads when needed.

A slew of fantastic writers were brought in for this project; including Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek legend Ronald D. Moore.

In 2017, Moore told Inverse:

"Vader wasn’t the central character of the show. He was going to show up for a big two-part episode where there was this big uprising happening, and there was a crack-down on things that were happening on Coruscant. Vader shows up and is kind of like, ‘We’re gonna stop all this shit right now.'"

Moore and others involved with the project have said nothing but great and interesting things about Underworld. Last year, an alleged leak of "test footage" hit the internet, which resulted mostly in everyone scratching their heads. Was this what all the fuss had been about? The short answer is no.

We never saw what Underworld could be because the issue with Underworld was always funding. Lucas' vision for this series was much bigger than his self-financed budget could allow, and in order to avoid too much creative interference from a TV network, Lucas simply gave up. The rest — including selling Star Wars to Disney — is history.

But, what if the show were to come back as an animated series? Underworld would have happened literally right after Order 66, meaning, right now, there's never been a better time to reboot this series. The scripts are written and George Lucas approved all of it. Who doesn't want this right now?

The Clone Wars is streaming in its entirety on Disney+.