Posted on 12/01/2020 7:47:52 AM PST by Kaslin
This Star Wars property reaches out to us as a familiar friend who wants to talk about more than the times long past.
As many have pointed out, the Skywalker story and the galaxy of interconnected characters and legends amounts to the great modern myth of our time. Right now, however, being a Star Wars fan hurts.
Marvel will continue to gain on and outpace Star Wars in popularity with younger generations and make more money at the box office (remember those?), but it will never mean what Star Wars does to the Force faithful. That’s why Star Wars fans are, well, insufferable, in defense of how they remember feeling when they first fell in love with the Millennium Falcon.
I was at my brother’s wedding last weekend, a nice little COVID-conscious affair in the Carolinas with close family and friends. He said something to me in the room where we were getting dressed about his other groomsman, whom he had befriended in high school. My brother said he was making a conscious effort to structure that longstanding friendship on a new foundation, one built on something more than talking about the good ol’ days.
I can relate. It’s the lure of old haunts and friends from your formative years — you always have something you can talk and laugh about. It’s great fun. But steering those relationships toward matters of the present, or sharing your struggles with marriage, parenting, and finances, is a unique challenge. People change. Realizing that can be painful, so we hide from it by going back to what we know.
“The Mandalorian’s” 13th episode just dropped on Disney Plus, launching season two of this groundbreaking Star Wars live-action series into new but quite familiar territory. On the dreary planet of Corvus, the Mandalorian (Pedro Pascal) completed the next step in his quest to reconnect The Child with the Jedi.
He found Ashoka Tano (Rosario Dawson), bringing to life a character that first debuted in “The Clone Wars” (2008) as the feisty padawan learner of Anakin Skywalker. Ashoka’s journey from Jedi to wanderer has become a staple of Star Wars fandom beyond the big screen since that time, and the lore about this character is something the deepest of Star Wars fans adore.
This episode, “The Jedi,” had me both searching for words and picking my jaw up off the floor. It’s a magnificent piece of Star Wars storytelling and imagery that for me, is the way you always imagine Star Wars in your head as a fan, but hardly ever see on screen.
Plenty of reviews point to the visual inspirations throughout this episode, but that’s not what interests me. It’s how “The Mandalorian” handles “fan service.” It’s how this particular Star Wars property reaches out to us as a familiar friend who wants to talk about more than the times long past.
“The Mandalorian” is enmeshed in the battle Star Wars (and any popular fiction franchise) has alway faced: What do the fans want? J.J. Abrams’ task with relaunching Star Wars from its slumber in 2015 with “Episode VII: The Force Awakens” wasn’t an easy one. It’s important to acknowledge and appreciate that. But what Abrams did could be summed up best by the emergence of Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and Chewbacca aboard the Millennium Falcon in a teaser for the film when Solo says, “Chewie, we’re home.”
We all came home at that moment. It was speaking directly to the fans. This is what you want, right? Yes and no.
Star Wars suffers greatly from its own success and legendary status. It’s a hostage of its most iconic moments and locations and feel-good moments. For Star Wars fans young and old, these moments are bound up with memories of seeing the films with their family or best friends, and of playing make-believe in their backyards till sundown.
It’s what Don Draper describes in his Carousel monologue about nostalgia: it “means the pain from an old wound. It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards… It takes us to a place where we ache to go again.” Like I said, Star Wars hurts.
The theatrical releases of new Star Wars films have been mired in this pain of fans grasping for a rush of a feeling they’ll never truly feel again. “The Mandalorian” does something different. It takes Star Wars lore seriously, as seriously as fans have always taken it but only experienced in video games, books, and painfully long animated series. These things take both dedication and time to consume.
That’s not to say Star Wars hasn’t tried. I’ll go down fighting on the hill that Rian Johnson’s “Episode VIII: The Last Jedi” was as divisive as it was because A) Star Wars legacy fanbase is too attached to some of the norms of storytelling and cinematic beats within the franchise, and B) Johnson was too outwardly gleeful in undermining those norms.
“The Last Jedi” is a beautiful movie that tried to deepen Star Wars, but down to its “tastes like salt” line and Luke’s meta commentary on the politics of the prequels, something about it wasn’t quite right. To some, it came across as a hostile assault. So Disney brings back J.J, to give the fans “what they want.” I cannot begin to express how depressing of an effort that was in “Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker” (my review here).
The answer to fan service is within “The Mandalorian’s” 45-minute episodes, these bursts of weekly Star Wars fanaticism that are cleverly made to appeal to the faithful but welcome willing new converts. Always wondered why there was a dragon-like skeleton in the desert of Tatooine in “Episode IV: A New Hope”? Well, let’s bring the Krayt Dragon to life for an episode capturing a mini-quest from a wildly popular 2003 Star Wars video game.
But when approaching Star Wars like Abrams did, you get a small droid wandering the desert with a secret message being held for the “Resistance.” Feels like old times, right? Sure. And we all think we want that, until we realize the void cannot be filled by selfish gratification.
I’ve said many times and will say again, absent a show like “The Mandalorian” to take Star Wars fandom seriously, the only way to truly enjoy the films as you grow older is to watch them with younglings and listen to what they have to say about them. Let someone else be the lonely kid with big dreams stuck in a desert wasteland. If you’re reading this, you’re not Luke Skywalker anymore, but the kids in yourself certainly are Rey.
“The Mandalorian” continues to draw on Star Wars of days past as a resource guide, but that’s the extent of its loyalty to the nostalgia of fans. It’s forging new paths for fans to discuss, not looking in the rearview mirror. It’s recognizing that Star Wars is a big-enough universe for any kind of character or story to fit into it, so it’s creating new ones.
I’m proud of my brother for what he said to me about his long-running friendship and his effort to bolster it by recognizing adulthood not impending, but present. Friendships that last require more than an endless supply of “South Park’s” “Member Berries” and awkward laughs predicated on who you used to be. We want to know who we are right now, and why our minds still drift off to Tatooine when we’re supposed to be adulting.
“The Mandalorian” proved yet again that it understands this. You should be watching.
Exactly!
First rule: make sure your directors are fans of the content. You could tell they didn’t understand or care.
Favreau and Filoni obviously love Star Wars.
Whoever was responsible for the last trilogy obviously hated Star Wars.
Favreau is very aware of the fact that the main character doesn’t show his face and the way they pull off knowing exactly what his emotions are is brilliant and hilarious.
I have never been left wondering what Mando is feeling or at all disconnected from his story.
I watched the Gallery series D+ had on it and while some of the episodes were junk, I appreciated how deeply Favreau and Filioni scrubbed through every detail on what could make this series successful and the inspirations they drew upon.
In regard to the helmet, they designed it with Clint Eastwood’s facial structure in mind. clint only has about 3 facial expressions, yet we never wondered what he was thinking.
I think that’s a cheap reason to not attempt to enjoy a fantastic show.
One suggestion with Clone Wars -- look up "Clone Wars Chronological Order" and follow it for episodes. The first couple seasons were bad about jumping around in time, but if you watch them in timeline order they make a much better and cohesive story.
Also, don't get turned off by the Bratty Little Kid Ahsoka Tano early on, the character finally "grows up" as the series progresses.
Imagine if, instead of giving Rey the Millenium Falcon they had given her Baby Yoda.
It’s also The A Team and The Incredible Hulk and a bunch of other 70s TV shows.
My wife & I started watching it last weekend. After hearing so many raves about it, I decided it was worth $6.99 for one month to see all the episodes. We are enjoying it but I cannot say we're blown away. The show is basically a space-western, and it relies on many tried and true tropes from western films.
As soon as Season 1 episode 4 started out with some marauding bad guys attacking a peaceful village and stealing their food and supplies, I told my wife "this episode will be The Magnificent 7*. It was, except that it was really a Magnificent 2 with Mando and a female former warrior training the peasantry and taking on the baddies.
* Or Seven Samurai, if you prefer.
Jeremy Bulloch, the actor who played Boba Fett always said he based how he played that character off of Eastwood’s Man With No Name.
Obviously Boba Fett is not the same character as the Mandalorian (or even a Mandalorian if you want to get really nerdy), but the same essence is there.
I tried and got bored after 3 episodes. I’m sure it’s good, I think I’ve just outgrown the genre.
I was telling my wife, if it was as easy as that, you would have seen light-speed torpedoes being used.
I sincerely doubt that NOBODY before her thought "I wonder what happens when something crashes into something else at light speed?"
Rey is CENTRAL to Disney culture.
Think about EVERY Disney movie since Snow White and Cinderella: they are all about a female protagonist. Disney caters to Disney princesses.
Rey is no princess. She has no story no progress. She is “perfect” and only obstructed by patriarchy.
I stand by, Save Star Wars = erase Rey.
Disney star wars is Star Wars for people who hate star wars by people who hate star wars.
Send them to Hoth.
Oh wow. I never played Galaxy. That’s cool. They’ve really mastered their Easter Egg game.
This blend of science fiction and western hails back to Star Trek, originally pitched by Gene Roddenberry as “Wagon Train in space”. The Mandalorian is more Have Gun, Will Travel in space, built neatly on the Star Wars canon developed by the original movies and Clone Wars series. This is not at all a bad structure, though perhaps a little unfamiliar to a modern audience. (An aside: if you haven’t, give old western TV series a chance. The storytelling is much better than the average show today, and the themes are usually strongly conservative without preachiness.)
The Lone Ranger belies that.
The Mandalorian is a good series. One of the few my son and I look forward to watching together.
That was explained in the original trilogy as Han explains he can't just jump to light speed without first programming in the coordinates, or route. Says you don't want to fly through a star.
The game had multiple player classes and you had to build a life for yourself under the shadow of the Empire.
Unfortunately a couple years in they got the great idea of creating a path to becoming a Jedi/Force user and it turned the game into a GRIND GAME to unlock force Sensitivity. For while you could still play your character as originally designed so it was only the true hard core players that attempted the close to impossible grind.
Then after a year or so of that they decided EVERYONE CAN BE A JEDI and the game became a sad shadow of itself.
Then at about the same time a little minor game called WOW came out, and the rest is history.
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