To celebrate this year’s Star Wars Day, Disney is releasing a brand new series of shorts called “Star Wars: Tales Of The Empire”, which is a continuation of the short series, “Star Wars: Tales Of The Jedi”.

This six-episode series follows two characters within the Galactic Empire, with three episodes focusing on a young Morgan Elsbeth, navigating the expanding Imperial world toward a path of vengeance, while the other three deal with the former Jedi Barriss Offee does what she must to survive a rapidly changing galaxy.

Each short is around ten minutes long, and each short is a self-contained story, but part of the larger Star Wars universe.  These shorts have been created by Dave Filoni and help fill in some of the blanks between the animated series and movies.  There is also a time jump between each short, as the characters have evolved along the way.

Once again, the animation for this series is superb and continues to push forward with technology, which we’ve seen improve with each new animated Star Wars series.

Three of the shorts focus on Morgan Esbeth, who was introduced in the “Mandalorian” series, before becoming a much more important character in “Ahsoka”.   The first short shows how she loses her family during the Clone Wars (which feels like a nice flashback to “The Clone Wars” era, before eventually becoming important to Thrawn’s plans.  While it’s kind of interesting to see a little more of Morgan’s backstory being filled out, I’m not really sure it’s necessary.

The other three shorts follow a Jedi named Barriss Offee, who originally debuted in the “Clone Wars” series. This follows her recruitment as one of the Inquisitors, a team of Jedi hunters run by Darth Vader. We get to see how she is still conflicted with her place within the Empire.

While all six of these shorts are enjoyable and worth checking out for die-hard Star Wars fans, but for casual fans, these shorts feel completely unnecessary and feel more like fleshing out lesser important characters.  I actually even had to look up who Barris and Morgan were when I started the first shorts as I wasn’t 100% sure if I remembered who they were, which, to me, highlights how these shorts were fleshing out minor characters that maybe didn’t need to be.

That being said, these shorts are still very enjoyable and help fill out the lore and backstory of two characters, which I’m sure die-hard fans are going to love, but they aren’t essential viewing.

Overall, “Star Wars: Tales Of The Empire” features some small adventures within the universe that are enjoyable but unnecessary. One of the issues I have with these shorts is that they just feel unnecessary. It would have been more fun to have had some bonus mini adventures with more established characters than wasting time on two side characters whose names I couldn’t remember even after watching!   These feel very much like a one-shot comic book, a nice little mini-adventure that’s fun but ultimately not important in the grand scheme.

Rating: 4 Out Of 5

“Star Wars: Tales Of The Empire” is out on Disney+ on Saturday, May 4th 2024.

Roger Palmer

Roger has been a Disney fan since he was a kid and this interest has grown over the years. He has visited Disney Parks around the globe and has a vast collection of Disney movies and collectibles. He is the owner of What's On Disney Plus & DisKingdom. Email: Roger@WhatsOnDisneyPlus.com Twitter: Twitter.com/RogPalmerUK Facebook: Facebook.com/rogpalmeruk

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