The Clone Wars' WWII Influence Shared at Comic-Con

If you, like me, missed San Diego Comic-Con this year, you also missed the Star Wars: The Clone Wars panel hosted by Pablo Hidalgo with two of the creative forces behind the show: Dave Filoni and Matt Michnovetz.  The panel not only revealed a few clips from the upcoming Season 5, but a few interesting World War II connections in Season Four's Umbara arc.  

Here is an excerpt from Pablo Hidalgo's summary on the official Star Wars Blog:

“George came up with the story,” explained Matt [Michnovetz, lead writer for The Clone Wars], “and he came into the room and pitched us this idea. He draws a lot of inspiration from classic movies, as a writer on the show, part of your homework is to go and look at the inspiration for these things. He wanted to do a battle from the movieThe Longest Day. We had a couple of those. He wanted to base the story a little bit around an old Jimmy Cagney movie called What Price Glory, which is a great source of inspiration of this, as well as The Caine Mutiny. I took inspiration from an episode of M*A*S*H*, where we added a little bit of that idea of where the commanding officer was doing things that weren’t necessarily in the best interests of the troops.”

This isn't the first time that World War II and war films served as inspiration for Star Wars: The Clone Wars.  In fact, Lucas originally pitched The Clone Wars to the media in 2008 as "sort of like Band of Brothers only with Jedi."  However, this does seem to be the first confirmation of multiple WWII films being used for one episode or arc.  As a bonus, The Longest Day was directed by Ken Annakin, the British filmmaker and namesake of Anakin Skywalker.

I'm off to find out what scenes from The Longest Day, What Price Glory, and The Caine Mutiny were used as inspiration.  In the mean time, head over to StarWars.comhttp://starwarsblog.starwars.com/index.php/2012/07/15/the-quotable-clone-wars-panel-report-from-san-diego-comic-con/ for all the details.