Darth Maul Returns in STAR WARS: CLONE WARS

After 10 years of being cut in half and assumed dead, Sith Lord Darth Maul is making a big return to the Star Wars franchise via the animated series, The Clone Wars. Despite the rather disappointing response to The Phantom Menace, Maul became one of the most popular characters for his awesome face tattoos and double bladed lightsaber.

A clip featuring footage from The Phantom Menace teases Maul’s return. “I found it funny in The Phantom Menace when Darth Maul got cut in half,” Dave Filoni, Clone Wars supervising director, says. “I thought George [Lucas] was definitively saying to the fans, ‘There’s no way this character is coming back. This is not a Boba Fett/Sarlacc Pit situation where, because of fan love, Boba gets out of that thing any number of ways.’ Fast-forward ten-years, and I’m the one to bring Maul back.” Part of the reasoning behind bringing Maul back is that George Lucas felt he was underused in The Phantom Menace. Besides doing some crazy fighting at the end, he only had a few short lines.

Truth be told, this isn’t the first time Maul has been brought back from the dead. The 2005 Dark Horse comic, Star Wars: Visionaries, featured Maul with a cybernetic lower body. The story isn’t considered canon however. There have been a couple of stories in the Star Wars Tales series that featured Maul, but they weren’t the real man. One has a clone while the other brought in a solid-state hologram. The Clone Wars will mark the first time the real Maul has reappeared in continuity.

<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/T0HJoli7OwI?rel=0″ frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>