People attuned to the Clone Wars need to be high on something _ high on being a lifelong devotee of “Star Wars” (hey, I’m a lapsed but curious fanboy myself), or at least high on the hope that “Star Wars” is salvageable. Sadly, this one shucks off all remaining pretense that “Star Wars” has (or had) universal appeal, and instead unfolds with all the majesty and emptiness of watching someone else play a video game. The ossification of “Star Wars” continues with this sub-chapter (appendix? owner’s manual?) of the cynically plundered saga.

It’s unsettling to begin with the Warner Bros. logo instead of Twentieth Century Fox’s fanfare logo, but hey, it’s a bottom-line galaxy, after all, in which George Lucas has directed his minions (among them director Dave Filoni) to march forth and make money however possible. Although Filoni’s team of animators pulls off several lovely but fleeting moments of inventive style and rich colors, we are right back in the fog of war from the first frame. It’s like having to retake a multiple-choice test in a history class you flunked: the Sith, the Jedi council, the chancellor, the separatists, the Old Republic, the senate, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the Trade Federation. The what? The hunh?

Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker (the celebrity voices are impersonated) are in the midst of the great and pointless Clone Wars, which take place between the live-action “Star Wars” movies that came out in 2002 and 2005. In those films, everyone talked on and on about the Clone Wars but hardly fought in them, sort of like an op-ed page with a lot of Henry Kissinger on it. The war, don’cha know, was rigged by the evil Chancellor Palpatine as a distraction so that he could finally declare himself Galactic Emperor and begin his tyrannical rule.

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