Composer From 'Star Wars Rebels' Reported To Return For 'The Bad Batch' On Disney+
The Direct is reporting via Film Music Reporter that music composer Kevin Kiner, who composed music for multiple Star Wars series since 2008, including Star Wars: The Clone Wars (the 2008 movie and subsequent series), as well as Disney’s first original Star Wars series, Rebels, is reportedly planning to return to compose music for the upcoming Disney+ series The Bad Batch. This new animated series is expected to focus on a specialized unit of clone troopers and their exploits. These new characters, originally created during the initial run of The Clone Wars but whose story arc was left unfinished when the series was cancelled at the time of Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm, were featured in an exclusive story arc included in a Disney-produced surprise seventh season of The Clone Wars this past year. Not surprisingly, Kevin Kiner composed the score for this final season of the series as well, and he even composed a special leitmotif (signature theme) for this special group!
Spotify users can check out his piece here: Bad Batch Theme (From "Star Wars: The Clone Wars - The Final Season")
It would be hard to imagine this theme not making an awesome reappearance in the upcoming Disney+ series!
Although many Star Wars fans like myself have grown up experiencing the grandeur of the Star Wars universe and its myriad tales through the amazing musical stylings of the legendary film composer John Williams, Kevin Kiner is one of many up and coming television and film composers to add their own unique imprints on the galaxy far, far away. Kiner has already been responsible for great Star Wars themes like the aforementioned “Bad Batch Theme,” as well as for creating cues for important characters and plot developments in both The Clone Wars and Rebels series to date.
Kiner is also responsible for some clever re-workings of classic Williams Star Wars themes, such as those composed for the wise and mystical Jedi Master Yoda in The Clone Wars and for the evil Darth Vader and Empire in Rebels. One of my favorite pieces for Rebels was “Glory of The Empire,” a major key celebratory version of Williams’ famous “Imperial March.” Many of these and other cues by Kiner have been released in recent years and, like with the "Bad Batch Theme," can currently be downloaded and/or streamed on multiple music services such as iTunes and Spotify. Some of Kiner’s original cues have even been recently slipped into other Star Wars series like The Mandalorian. That show’s composer, Ludwig Goransson, made a musical allusion to a theme Kiner originally created for Ashoka Tano, a Jedi character created for The Clone Wars animated series who recently made the leap to a live-action character, as featured in this past season of The Mandalorian.
As Chancellor Sheev Palpatine once said to budding Jedi Padawan Anakin Skywalker, we will continue to watch Kevin Kiner’s career within the Star Wars universe “with great interest.”
Source(s): The Direct