Chris

It’s an interesting piece of movie trivia that the Saga films don’t contain a discrete theme for the character of Obi-Wan Kenobi. My guess would be because in the original film, within the principal ensemble he’s nevertheless (whisper it) a secondary character and in the sequels his brief appearances support bigger themes like the force or the Skywalker family. I suspect that Williams will then have felt that composing a theme for him for the prequels would have been too jarring, because musically he was attempting to carry the story from its untold beginning to the point we all know so well. When watched in chronological story order, the sudden lack of an Obi-Wan theme in IV would be jarring.

What’s allowed him to compose an Obi-Wan theme now is the fact that there has been no serious attempt to make the new Disney+ shows sound like the saga films, even though they’ve bent over backwards to make them look like them. From the news report it’s clear that this series isn’t going to sound like the saga either. Its composer is Natalie Holt, and she hasn’t collaborated with Williams on this, she has just received a basic theme composition, and some ideas for how its elements might be woven into the score. What she has received isn’t going to have been orchestrated either, and Williams won’t have had any input into that process when it came to it.

I don’t mean to give you a flaccid realism factor, but one thing this *doesn’t* mean is that the Obi-Wan series score is going to sound like Star Wars.