The Star Wars franchise has been going on for a long time, but The Mandalorian makes it feel new again. How did creator Jon Favreau pull that off?
If you ask me, I think The Mandalorian (watch on Disney+) is the most entertaining Star Wars thing since the original movie. I know that’s bold, but I’m sticking to it. The performances are strong, the show is lovingly made, and the story — a gruff bounty hunter develops a soft spot for a tiny baby alien and helps him avoid capture — has a simplicity that cuts through my cynicism and pulls me in.
As it ends up, keeping things simple was part of creator Jon Favreau’s mission statement. “This was an opportunity to prune everything back to the beginnings again,” he told Deadline. “And having new characters allowed us to do that.”
Favreau’s idea was make a show that drew on some of the original influences behind 1979’s original Star Wars movie, like Western and samurai movies. And doing that led Favreau and his team somewhere even better. “What was really mind-blowing is there’s so much to trying to create that authenticity, to make it feel akin to what George had done, and then you realize that George was doing it without a road map.”
For better or worse, that’s not what Favreau is doing, as however new it feels, The Mandalorian is still firmly situated in the world George Lucas created. “To have a way to create a freshness, while still being respectful of what came before, I think is one of the challenges of storytellers in this moment, because we’re inundated with so much content,” Favreau said. “Now, everything’s at the touch of a finger, so everybody has a tremendous cultural context…You know, everybody’s checking your work.” He compared it to mixing songs. “We’re DJs, playing Beatles songs. He’s The Beatles. And the trick is, how do you recombine that?”
So far, they’re doing a bang-up job of making the show feel fresh, mostly through new characters like the universally loved Baby Yoda. Credit for his appearance goes to executive producer Dave Filoni, the guy behind animated shows like Star Wars: The Clone Wars. “Dave had done a sketch of kind of a Michelangelo/E.T. moment, and that was a source of inspiration,” Favreau remembered. “Then, Doug Chiang and the whole art department started generating drawings of it, and the Legacy people built it.”
This is probably the moment he’s talking about, with Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) and Baby Yoda reaching out to touch each other like God and Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel:
Pedro Pascal is the Mandalorian in THE MANDALORIAN, exclusively on Disney+
E.T., of course, is the adorable green alien from Steven Spielberg’s famous movie. Put ’em together and you’ve got yourself a Baby Yoda.
The second season of The Mandalorian comes out in October, and I can’t wait.
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