The animated, upcoming Star Wars: The Clone Wars opens this week, providing audiences another opportunity to pal around with old friends such as Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and R2-D2.

However, those that voices those characters in past Star Wars films won't be part of the project. How come? MTV went to director George Lucas for the answer.

When we decided to do the feature, we went back to the actors and said, ‘Look, we’re doing a feature. Would you like to do the voice? Could you come in a month?’ Some of them were all over the world. It was hard to get all the actors that would be off on set.

You need people available every week. [Also] you can’t really afford multi-million dollar actors to do a television series. Those guys make more during their coffee break.