Star Wars Rebels executive producer Greg Weisman recently had a chance to talk with IGN’s Eric Goldman about the series, where he discusses numerous topics such as his first experience going to Skywalker Ranch, working with Dave Filoni, Simon Kinberg and Pablo Hidalgo, the responsibility of bringing Star Wars to a new generation, the characters and tone of the show, and about the series having an end game. Here is a portion of the interview:

[blockquote cite=]Weisman said, of his experience on Rebels, “Most of it’s just been fantastic. I’ve got a couple of tremendous producing partners in Simon Kinberg and Dave Filoni — two incredibly great guys that are really wonderful to work with. Then, just from a personality standpoint, there’s no doubt of the three of us, I’m the crankiest. I’m the curmudgeon of the three of us. But they are just joys to work with, so incredibly talented. Then we’ve got — I’m not allowed to say who — a terrific writing staff on this show. We’ve got a phenomenal cast on this show — I’m also not allowed to say who! — but I know the names are going to be revealed very soon, just not yet.”

Describing the approach to Rebels and the widespread potential audience, Weisman said, “We’re all very dedicated, and we know this show is going to be canon, so we take that responsibility very seriously. We know that on the one hand there’s an audience who’s going to be watching this that knows everything there is to know about Lucasfilm canon and knows beyond that tons of stuff from the Expanded Universe, which may or may not turn out to be canon once Lucasfilm decides what is official and what’s not. So we want the show to work for that group, the most extreme fanboys out there. At the same time, we also have the responsibility that for a certain generation of kids, this is going to be their first exposure to Star Wars. By the time this comes out next fall, their kids were young enough that they won’t have seen Clone Wars. Forget the movies, they won’t have seen Clone Wars! So this will be the first Star Wars thing they’re seeing, and we take that responsibility very seriously as well.”

Weisman also noted that Rebels has a bit of a ticking clock element to its storyline. “Most of the series I’ve worked on are very much open-ended. There is no end to Gargoyles, there’s no end to Young Justice. Those shows may not get picked up, and I don’t own these properties, so I may have to stop working on them at various points. But there actually is an endgame to Star Wars Rebels, because this is about a finite period of time between Episodes III and IV. It starts about 14 and a half years after the end of Episode III and about four or five years before Episode IV. This is about how the Rebel Alliance came to be. So once the Rebel Alliance is, that’s pretty much where the show ends. I don’t know how many seasons that is. It’s not like we’ve nailed that down like, ‘Oh, we’re going to exactly X amount of seasons.’ But if all goes well, that’s the goal: we go from the origins of the Rebel Alliance to the point where the Rebel Alliance is, which would lead in essence directly into A New Hope. That’s the goal, to fill in that gap between those four or five years.”[/blockquote]

When reading the full interview, it’s clear that Greg Weisman and the rest of the Star Wars Rebels crew are really excited about the series and telling new Star Wars stories set in this time period that will show the formation of the Rebellion that we saw in Episodes IV-VI.

Be sure to check out the full interview over at IGN