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Jedi! You are surrounded, your army is decimated. Make peace with the Force now, for this is your final hour. But know that I, General Grievous, am not completely without mercy. I will grant you a warrior's death. Prepare...
—General Grievous
I have never been into Star Wars very much, but I did follow Star Wars: Clone Wars (the 2D 2003 series, not the 3D 2008 series) pretty closely when it aired on Cartoon Network back in 2003–2005; I recall regularly watching the premieres of new episodes. Although I enjoyed the entire series, the thing I remember most about it is the General Grievous character, in particular his first appearance in the Chapter 20
episode (skip to the 2:05 mark).
Though my knowledge of Star Wars was very limited at the time (I had seen only The Phantom Menace up until then), I knew at least that a Jedi was supposed to be very hard to kill, so when I witnessed a villain taking on six Jedi at once, defeating all of them and even killing three and critically wounding two in the process—all the while suffering no injuries himself—I was blown away. His first battle scene, which begins at the 3:45 mark of the same video, starts with Grievous chillingly announcing his intent to kill the six Jedi; approaching slowly and unnerving all of them; and then pouncing suddenly, overwhelming the Jedi with his unorthodox and acrobatic fighting style, which includes leaping to and from walls, spinning his body while holding lightsabers, and killing people by using his mechanical feet to grab and then slam their heads into the ground.
His first battle scene concludes during the beginning of the next episode, Chapter 21
, where it takes several clone troopers with big guns, and even a gunship shooting at him, just to keep General Grievous at bay long enough for the survivors to escape. His other major battle of the series is the one on Coruscant (his scenes are shown at the end of the Chapter 23
episode, as well as throughout the Chapter 24
and Chapter 25
episodes), in which he reveals (at the 9:56 mark of Chapter 25
) that he really had four arms the entire time and was thus merely playing around with the Jedi up to that point.
And yet, that first appearance and scene of his in the Chapter 20
episode is still the one I remember the most after all these years. For a time in 2004 or 2005, I had my computer's desktop background set to a cool-looking image of General Grievous, and a major reason I went to see Revenge of the Sith when it was released in theaters in May 2005 was because I learned that he was going to be in that film. (Unfortunately, in that movie he was no longer a badass, as he was single-handedly killed by Obi-Wan Kenobi.)