New STAR WARS REBELS Clip Features a Young Wedge Antilles
Star Wars X-Wing pilot Wedge Antilles will make his debut on Star Wars Rebels in the next episode, which is titled “The Antilles Extraction.” This is a younger version of the character from the original Star Wars films. I'm sure you all remember how bravely Wedge fought when he took on and survived the attack on the Death Star. He ended up becoming a respected veteran of Rogue Squadron.
This will give us some background of the character and establish a new canon for Wedge. As you might have expected, this is a different background story from the one he was given in the Expanded Universe. In this new version, Wedge is still a trainee pilot at the Imperial Academy. While there, he contacts the Rebel Alliance because he wants a way out.
The next episode of Star Wars Rebels is described as follows:
“Sabine goes undercover as a cadet in the Empire’s elite flight academy to help break out several young pilots wanting to defect to the rebellion.”
Wedge is voiced by Nathan Kress (iCarly, Into The Storm). When talking about Wedge's new backstory, showrunner Dave Filoni previously said:
"It’s kind of a fun thing. One of the biggest things and it may be the rain cloud in the room, but, every writer that comes on, they pitch I’d love to see this, I’d love to see that. What about Biggs? What about Porkins? You know and but you wanna be careful not to make it like the Celebrity Laugh-In show where celebrity guests are appearing. But we hadn’t had someone of that nature. Kind of like a pilot. We have a lot of Rebel pilots. And well maybe some of these guys crossover. So you get Wedge and you get Y-Wings, which is kind of showing us again that we’re building towards that New Hope moment where the Rebels seem to be structured in a different way than we were in the beginning of Star Wars Rebels, which is they were just a band on their own with very little communication to a major core. And I’ve said for a couple seasons now that they’re building towards a more Rebel Alliance. But at the point we started you didn’t have Alliance. You had ragtag groups spread throughout the galaxy that had different ideas about politics. But all they could agree on was the Empire’s bad. And you’ll see that as we go that some of those characters that you know more famously from the Rebellion start to come into play now from Star Wars Rebels ’cause they have to. And Wedge is just, you know, everybody loves Wedge, ’cause he somehow inexplicably survived all three films. So he gets a lot of fan love for that."
You'll get to see young Wedge in action on Saturday, October 8th. In the meantime, here's the clip!