Is today a big day for pop culture of what? Tonight, the Game of Thrones season 8 premiere airs on HBO, and right now, Disney is busy blowing the top off the Star Wars fandom at the Star Wars Celebration in Chicago. We already got a trailer for Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker. Now, the cast and crew of The Mandalorian — the first live-action Star Wars TV series — have opened up about what to expect.
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You can watch the full Mandalorian panel below, which includes showrunner Jon Favreau and lead actor Pedro Pascal, who you may recognize as Oberyn Martell from Game of Thrones. The feed goes black during the sizzle reel, but wouldn’t you know it? Someone had their phone out.
“The Mandalorian is a mysterious, lone gunfighter in the outer reaches of the galaxy,” said Pascal. “Some might say he has questionable moral character, in line with some of our best Westerns, and some good samurai And he’s a badass…He’s got a lot of Clint Eastwood in him.” It certainly sounds like it, right down to the “Man With No Name” conceit.
Here are some takeaways from the panel:
- The show is set five years after Return of the Jedi, after the fall of the Empire but before the rise of the First Order in The Force Awakens.
- The Mandalorian, whatever his name is, pilots a gunship called the Razorcrest, which looks pretty different from the Slave I, ship that fan favorite character Boba Fett — another Mandalorian — piloted in the original trilogy.
- Speaking of Fett, you’ve probably noticed that the Mandalorian wears armor that recalls the famed bounty armor. Just to be clear, this new guy is a completely original character, although he “the same warrior tribe” as Boba. How does that work into all that stuff from the prequels about Boba Fett being a clone of the mercenary Jango Fett? I don’t even know; let’s take things one at a time.
- Other cast members include Gina Carano, who plays a character named Cara Dune, an “ex-Rebel shock troople” who is “having some trouble reintegrating…into society.”
- Carl Weathers — Apollo Creed from the Rocky movies — plays Greef Karga. “He’s kind of the head of this guild of bounty hunters,” Weathers explained. “There seems to be a lot of nefarious people… He’s looking for someone to go after a product that he wants to bring to a client that’s worth a lot and that’s very valuable, and guess who he finds? He finds a bounty hunter named ‘Mandalorian.’” And a series is born.
And finally, the logo:
You’ll be able to watch the first episode of The Mandalorian Disney+ when the streaming service goes live on November 12 of this year.
In other Star Wars news, Electronic Arts has dropped a trailer for its upcoming video game, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, which in contrast to the Mandalorian is set after the end of the prequel trilogy, when the Empire rises and the Jedi are driven into hiding. Check it out:
EA has been making Star Wars games for a while now, and it’s come under a lot of fire from fans for predatory business practices and canceling promising games and just generally doing a crap job. This new game reportedly won’t have loot boxes or microtransactions or any of the bull they’ve been pulling lately, which is nice to hear, although gamers have been lied to before; I’d put a pin in that claim until further notice. Another good sign is that the game is being developed by Respawn Entertainment, which recently had a huge hit with Apex: Legends. We’ll see if they come through when the game is released on November 15, 2019.
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