Star Wars Rebels: Read the Videos

Coming January 2015

As the TV premiere of Star Wars Rebels rapidly approaches, Lucasfilm has released four short videos to highlight individual characters (links below). They also set the tone for what’s to come in the new animated series. These shorts are not part of future episodes though - they are mini-episodes set in the same world and time-frame.

The four videos are entertaining and engaging ways to introduce the action and characters, but if you want to possibly dig deeper these stories have all been released in brand-new books from Lucasfilm Press/Disney Book Group, adapted for various reading levels.

For confident readers, all four stories have been retold and expanded upon in the “Star Wars Saga Chapter Book” Rise of the Rebels by Michael Kogge. The illustrations are minimal but very cool and stylized in this book and each tale gets three short chapters.

For beginning readers there are a few ways to experience these stories in books:

The Machine in the Ghost may have sounded like a creepy title for a young children’s picture book so it was retitled Chopper Saves the Day, but it’s almost line-for-line the same exciting scene aboard Hera’s ship...and it comes with stickers!

Sabine’s skirmish with stormtroopers Art Attack will be released early next year as part of Disney's World of Reading Series. The Level 1 reader will be called, appropriately, Sabine’s Art Attack.

Zeb takes on a few stormtroopers himself in Entanglement and young readers can enjoy it on bookshelves now as the Level 1 World of Reading reader Zeb to the Rescue.
 

Finally, Ezra encounters a crashed TIE-fighter pilot in Property of Ezra Bridger, also now available as the somewhat unimaginatively-titled Level 2 reader Ezra and the Pilot.

For the most confident young readers, this same Ezra story also makes its way into Ryder Windham's junior novel Ezra's Gamble as an epilogue to that fun adventure.

-Chris @SWKidscast