Cad Bane

Cad Bane recurs in the 2008 animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars. He first appears in the first season's finale "Hostage Crisis", in which he and Aurra Sing assemble a team of fellow bounty hunters to rescue Ziro the Hutt from the Republic's prison facility. They infiltrate the Senate building on Coruscant, murdering all of the guards and taking a group of senators hostage as leverage to demand for Ziro's release. Their plan is successful, and the bounty hunters manage to escape with Ziro, despite Anakin Skywalker's attempt to stop them.

Bane makes his first chronological appearance in the second season premiere "Holocron Heist", in which he is hired by Darth Sidious to steal a Holocron from the vault of the Jedi Temple. He escapes with the Holocron and manages to evade Anakin Skywalker and Ahsoka Tano in "Cargo of Doom". Bane subsequently helps Sidious use the Holocron to kidnap several Force-sensitive children in "Children of the Force" before he is captured by the Jedi. Obi-Wan Kenobi and Mace Windu force him to take them to the Holocron, and Bane leads them into a trap in his headquarters, giving himself time to flee.

The third season explores the events leading up to Bane's takeover of the Senate building in season one. "Evil Plans" features Bane capturing the droids R2-D2 and C-3PO, who involuntarily give him the schematics of the Senate building. The following episode "Hunt for Ziro", which takes place after "Hostage Crisis", reveals that Bane was hired to extract Ziro from Republic custody by Jabba the Hutt as Ziro possessed a datapad with incriminating evidence against the Hutt crime families. Shortly after Bane is congratulated by Jabba for his success, Ziro escapes and the bounty hunter is hired to track down and capture the rogue Hutt. He eventually finds Ziro's corpse on Teth but realises the datapad is missing. After a short altercation with Obi-Wan Kenobi and Quinlan Vos, who were also searching for the Hutt, Bane escapes once again.

Prior to the fourth season's episode "Deception", Bane is revealed to have intentionally been captured in order to infiltrate a Republic prison; he is hired by Count Dooku to break Moralo Eval out of the facility. Unbeknownst to them, Obi-Wan Kenobi poses as bounty hunter Rako Hardeen and seeks to gain the duo's trust to uncover Dooku's plans. Following a successful prison break and pursuit throughout the Outer Rim, the trio finally reach The Box: a competition to decide which of a small group of chosen bounty hunters will participate in the Separatist plot to kidnap Chancellor Palpatine on Naboo. Bane and "Hardeen" survive the events of the box and go on to kidnap the Chancellor in "Crisis on Naboo", but Kenobi's deception is soon revealed and he manages to foil the plot, leading to Bane's arrest once more.

Following the series' cancellation in 2014, creator Dave Filoni confirmed that Bane was slated to return in an unfinished story arc which saw him and a group of bounty hunters mentoring the young Boba Fett, helping him follow in his late father's footsteps. The end of the arc would see Bane and Fett having a standoff, which presumably resulted in the former's death.

Years after the Clone Wars came to an end, Sabine Wren somehow heard of Cad Bane, and designed a graffiti image of him, inspired by his daring combat skills. This image can be briefly seen in the second episode of the first season of Star Wars Rebels, "Fighter Flight".

Bane also appears in the five-part Marvel Comics comic book miniseries Star Wars: Darth Maul, set before the events of the prequel trilogy, where he aides the titular character in kidnapping a Jedi Padawan.

In April 2014, most of the licensed Star Wars novels and comics produced since the originating 1977 film Star Wars were rebranded as Star Wars Legends and declared non-canon to the rest of the franchise by Lucasfilm.[2][3][4] Cad Bane has appeared in several comics and video games set in the Legends continuity.

The character was created as a recurring antagonist for the 2008 Star Wars: The Clone Wars television series set during the prequel film trilogy. The season one finale "Hostage Crisis" director Giancarlo Volpe compared Cad Bane to another Star Wars bounty hunter, Boba Fett, stating:

The crew loves Cad Bane, and I really think the fans will, too. He brings a serious bad-ass sensibility to Star Wars. He's a lethal and ruthless bounty hunter, and you see that right away in the episode. Unlike Boba Fett, Cad doesn't take prisoners.[5]

Originally, supervising director Dave Filoni and series writer Henry Gilroy planned to create the Durge character that was already introduced in the 2003 micro-series. Durge would instead be redesigned as a human character but this exploration was short lived after the suggestion of series producer and Star Wars creator George Lucas to go Western. Lucas took inspiration from western film actors such as Lee Van Cleef's portrayals of Angel Eyes in The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly and of Colonel Mortimer in For a Few Dollars More while Corey Burton uses Peter Lorre's voice as inspiration.[6][7] These characters' Western influences help to bring Bane to life while still containing the features of the Duros species in the Star Wars universe with his own original characterization. Burton's voice would then be modified on the computer by the series' sound production team. While Filoni researched the character, he happened to come across an unlabeled concept art of a gun-toting bounty hunter with a wide-brimmed hat from the original trilogy and that concept helped bring the character to life.[6] Filoni speculated on George Lucas' original idea for the character that became Bane:

Something you notice about George Lucas after a while is that he'll mention a name like 'Mace Windu' in a [1973] version of Star Wars, and then it pops up in 1999. So, this, I guess might have been an idea George had for the character Cad Bane way back when, and now finally he's getting around to bringing him to the screen in The Clone Wars.[6]