The Mandalorian - Star Wars webseries from Jon Favreau

[sh9000]

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March 1.

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[no3Ljm]

 

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[Tking22]

I'm hoping for some better storytelling this season, while season 2 was fun, it felt like a lot of fan-service and setup for other series. 

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[TangledThorns]

Looks good but makes me wonder when Disney will start making STAR WARS movies again? lol.

[Mog]

So. . . I take it Hasbro will be milking those Mandalorian molds again to make about half a billion repaints for all these new Mando characters?

[Bolt]

5 hours ago, TangledThorns said:

Looks good but makes me wonder when Disney will start making STAR WARS movies again? lol.

It's gonna happen..

[Mog]

But will they be GOOD Star Wars movies? 🤨

[derex3592]

No.......no they won't. 

[Mog]

It’s not like Disney is only 2 for 5 on making good to okay movies, or that they’re only hitting 50% on their live-action Plus series. . . . . 

Oh.  Crap.

[Seto Kaiba]

4 hours ago, Mog said:

It’s not like Disney is only 2 for 5 on making good to okay movies, or that they’re only hitting 50% on their live-action Plus series. . . . . 

Oh.  Crap.

Credit where credit is due, they're trying and they're putting in some serious effort and doing a fair amount of innovating.

It surely does not help that their audience is infamously difficult to please... or that they're competing against decades of rose-tinted memories and fevered imaginings.

I'd definitely like to see The Mandalorian go less hard on the fanservice, but it does offer some good hefty action sequences if nothing else.  

[Roy Focker]

6 hours ago, Mog said:

So. . . I take it Hasbro will be milking those Mandalorian molds again to make about half a billion repaints for all these new Mando characters?

The 3rd season is just a live action cartoon to sell toys.  It's a continuation of the Clone Wars cartoon.  2nd season was a backdoor pilot for all the live action spin off for the Clone Wars.  The Mandolorian reached its conclusion at the end of the 2nd season.  This is just fan service to sell merchandise.  Baby Yoda and multiple Mandolorians equals $.

Fan boys will get excited by all the cool bad ass Mandolorians kicking ass but I doubt we're going to be wowed by the story telling.  What works for a cartoon doesn't mean it will work for live action. 

 

[Bolt]

6 hours ago, Mog said:

But will they be GOOD Star Wars movies? 🤨

 

6 hours ago, derex3592 said:

No.......no they won't. 

Chances are low. But we can always (A New) Hope ! 😉

 

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Credit where credit is due, they're trying and they're putting in some serious effort and doing a fair amount of innovating.

It surely does not help that their audience is infamously difficult to please... or that they're competing against decades of rose-tinted memories and fevered imaginings.

Not sure about that. Considering One series was great, one was good and the rest were meh...It's not that the audience is so hard to please. The 3 movies lacked serious cohesion, and suffered from bad writing. Does anyone love that they really only teased Luke Skywalker having anything to do with 3 movies !? Or carbon (froze) copied the first movie or spent the whole second movie winding down the clock while Finn did what ? Or brought back Palpatine? Or added a "Dyad" in the force or had them riding horseback on a star destroyer ? The list goes on.! 

 

1 hour ago, Roy Focker said:

The 3rd season is just a live action cartoon to sell toys.  It's a continuation of the Clone Wars cartoon. 

To some degree, I would say this is true. But that can be said about many SW entries. Nonetheless, I'm looking forward to more story and some good action. It's either that or go back to the Expanded Universe in comic and print form. (Which were also products$)  Just cant win.!

Edited January 18, 2023 by Bolt

[Seto Kaiba]

21 minutes ago, Bolt said:

Not sure about that. Considering One series was great, one was good and the rest were meh...It's not that the audience is so hard to please. The 3 movies lacked serious cohesion, and suffered from bad writing. Does anyone love that they really only teased Luke Skywalker having anything to do with 3 movies !? Or carbon (froze) copied the first movie or spent the whole second movie winding down the clock while Finn did what ? Or brought back Palpatine? Or added a "Dyad" in the force or had them riding horseback on a star destroyer ? The list goes on.! 

The general vibe I get from Disney's Star Wars is that there's a room of suits somewhere who are just completely bewildered and occasionally frustrated to tears trying to figure out what exactly Star Wars fans want from the franchise.

First they tried giving fans more of what they loved with a nice, safe sequel based on A New Hope and got reamed for it.  Then they did a side story that tied into A New Hope directly and audiences LOVED IT.  Then they tried to go in an original direction with the story the way fans demanded and got reamed for it.  Then they tried to go back and do another nice, safe side story tied into A New Hope and got reamed even harder.  By that point, it's clear everyone was down on their knees weeping and begging the fans "Please, just tell us what you want" and then they tried to make EVERYONE happy and ultimately made nobody happy.

It's the same deal with the TV shows.  They did The Mandalorian as a fanservice extravaganza devoted to the culture of a fan favorite background character and fans loved it.  Then they tried to expand on that with a spinoff featuring that fan favorite background character with similar quantities of fanservice in The Book of Boba Fett, and fans hated it.  They tried appealing with a different fan favorite via Obi-Wan Kenobi and got torn to bits for it.  Then they go completely off the rails and do a prequel story about a supporting character from the Rogue One movie fans loved and it ran away with the fanbase's hearts somehow.  

There's little apparent rhyme or reason to it if you're looking at it from a high level or an outsider's viewpoint.  To me at least, their confusion is quite understandable.  They're trying, but they don't seem to quite grasp what the fans want and many fans couldn't really explain it if asked.  They're throwing EVERYTHING at the wall to see what sticks in the hope that they'll find a pattern somewhere.

[Mog]

It’s when they go off with some stupid plot-filled idea and/or are inconsistent with the characters that Disney gets in trouble.

We hated The Last Jedi because they portrayed Luke in a way that made zero sense with his past characterization.

Book of Boba Fett failed because they took away any teeth behind Boba’s character.  Boba in Mando straight up shot someone and took his place.  But Boba in BOFB acted the putz and tried to be some benign crime lord. 

I thought they portrayed Obi solidly, but there were so many stupid plot moves that took you completely out of the story.

When story reigns king and the characters are written consistently, that’s when Star Wars works.

[Bolt]

21 minutes ago, Mog said:

When story reigns king and the characters are written consistently, that’s when Star Wars works.

This. 
It doesn't matter what scenario the "suits" come up with, bad writing is bad writing. It's not so much the fans cannot conceivably be please. The successful entries in SW show the exact opposite. Aside from giving credit. Also put blame where it belongs. It's not just the fan base. 

[Roy Focker]

Andor worked because it was very light on fan service.  Plus no forced action scenes because we went 5 minutes without any action and our research shows people get bored.  That show used the universe to tell a story.  Andor would have been good even without Star Wars.  It does help to have Star Wars universe to sell a good show.

I want them to find good scripts and then adapt them to Star Wars.  Don't need fan service and nonstop action to make good television.

[Seto Kaiba]

37 minutes ago, Mog said:

It’s when they go off with some stupid plot-filled idea and/or are inconsistent with the characters that Disney gets in trouble.

The problem I see with this line of reasoning is that "stupid" is subjective when it comes to ideas and characters are meant to be people in the story... and people change over time.  

They're revisiting characters years before or after their first or last appearances in the main series.  It's not surprising they'd be somewhat different due to various traumatic events or having not yet experienced those traumas yet.  Boba Fett's had five years after a humbling defeat and near-death experience to get his life together and he wasn't exactly young.  Luke had three decades of misery after a confidence-crushing personal failure, the betrayal of his best student, the destruction of his life's work, and the return of a threat he believed was defeated for good.  That kind of trauma changes people.

 

All in all, if there's a pattern, I think it's "stay the hell away from anything to do with previous Star Wars main series titles... just go hard on original content to avoid any sacred cows", and The Mandalorean does that reasonably well at least.

[Mog]

And yet this Boba Fett who had this humbling defeat and near-death experience STILL SHOT THE CURRENT DAIMYO IN COLD BLOOD shortly before BOBF started.  It's not like Bib tried to kill Boba or was responsible for killing Boba's adopted Tusken family.  He was just in the way and making himself fat (at the expense of his minions).  Then once Boba becomes daimyo himself, he almost never shows that edge again.  He wiped out Stormtroopers like no one's business, killed Bib, and then inconsistently, he hesitates when people outright betray him and disrespect him.  That's inconsistency.

Reva's motivations were driven by plot instead of character.  She witnessed the slaughter of her fellow Padawans, and yet she had no qualms sending Leia, a mere child, to get tortured.  And then once she has the chance to kill Vader's son, she couldn't go through with it.  That's inconsistency.

With Luke, we could argue till the cows come home.  Where you argue in support of his more recent trauma, I look back at a dude that never hesitated to rescue his friends and a person that actually succeeded in saving and turning his evil father back to the light.  And yet this same Luke showed zero concern, once he found out that Han died?

Regarding stupid plots, do the powers that be at Disney really need someone to say that having to rescue Leia twice is redundant in the Obi series?  Or that rescuing Leia by hiding her under an ill-fitting trench coat is beyond silly?

[Big s]

A lot of the problems here are the same problem with all of Disney owned franchises. Willow for example is the newest one where you revisit old heroes, but they’re not heroes anymore. They’re somehow messed up and almost nonfunctional and have to train a replacement or new generation to fix what’s wrong with them in the process. They’ve been reusing this in everything they’re running these days from marvel and Star Wars and now Willow.

The great thing about A New Hope is that we meet a real hero that had been in hiding. He doesn’t dwell on past mistakes, he teaches wisdom and skill to Luke and that’s what made him a great character. If there had never been any prequel or side stories, he would have been remembered as a great retired hero/teacher.

Now all we get are shows and movies where they bring back a beloved character and he has to be broken and twisted in a way that makes everyone gag.

Mando was great because he wasn’t a messed up relic of the past and Andor ended up being pretty good because he wasn’t getting taught by a washed up main character.

[Bolt]

9 minutes ago, Big s said:

A lot of the problems here are the same problem with all of Disney owned franchises. Willow for example is the newest one where you revisit old heroes, but they’re not heroes anymore. They’re somehow messed up and almost nonfunctional and have to train a replacement or new generation to fix what’s wrong with them in the process. They’ve been reusing this in everything they’re running these days from marvel and Star Wars and now Willow.

The great thing about A New Hope is that we meet a real hero that had been in hiding. He doesn’t dwell on past mistakes, he teaches wisdom and skill to Luke and that’s what made him a great character. If there had never been any prequel or side stories, he would have been remembered as a great retired hero/teacher.

Now all we get are shows and movies where they bring back a beloved character and he has to be broken and twisted in a way that makes everyone gag.

Mando was great because he wasn’t a messed up relic of the past and Andor ended up being pretty good because he wasn’t getting taught by a washed up main character.

I'll say again. Bad writing. It's too bad really. Beloved characters certainly didn't need to be so broken , weak and foolish. Especially after enduring so many adventures and trials. Really over played.

[Mog]

Well, Andor’s “mentor” is seriously messed up.  BUT he acknowledges his flaws and accepts that which must be done.

They gave us time with old Luthen and then layered the bastard big time.

It’s an example of good writing and letting the character, rather than the plot, guide where the story should go.

[Big s]

6 hours ago, Mog said:

Well, Andor’s “mentor” is seriously messed up.  BUT he acknowledges his flaws and accepts that which must be done.

They gave us time with old Luthen and then layered the bastard big time.

It’s an example of good writing and letting the character, rather than the plot, guide where the story should go.

The difference with Luther is that he didn’t let his problems break him to the point of uselessness. He pushes through and adapts. He might give an over dramatic speech, but he’s definitely not useless and knows what he has to do.

[Mog]

The funny thing is that back in the OT times, I used to dislike Obi.

Based on the knowledge we had at the time, I saw him as a guy who thought he could be as good a teacher as Yoda and someone who failed to save Anakin.  And he lied to Luke!

You compare his training of Luke to Yoda’s more extensive training, and I saw it as “Yeah, Yoda’s a much better teacher.”

For all their flaws, the prequels did improve my view of old Obi.  Add in the two cartoon series, and you see that Obi did love Anakin and tried to be a good teacher.  All this additional backstory put the responsibility for Anakin’s fall back on himself (with a crap-ton of manipulation from Palps 😉).

[Roy Focker]

Luther is a mentor that we've never met before. He's like Obi-wan when the only Star Wars was the first movie. Something happened in their past to make them who they are now, but we never saw how they were in the first place. There's no need for a good backstory to convince us of their drastic personality change.

The sequels needed a reason to keep Luke away as the hero for all these years. One they went with kept him away and was also against character. In my opinion the reason why Luke couldn't be found and wasn't rushing to save the galaxy was because he was already dead. Steal from the 6th Sense. The birth of Kylo Ren is when Ben Solo killed Luke. Skywalker was a force ghost stuck on that planet this entire time. That would have kept him away without breaking his character.

[Seto Kaiba]

15 hours ago, Mog said:

And yet this Boba Fett who had this humbling defeat and near-death experience STILL SHOT THE CURRENT DAIMYO IN COLD BLOOD shortly before BOBF started.  It's not like Bib tried to kill Boba or was responsible for killing Boba's adopted Tusken family.  He was just in the way and making himself fat (at the expense of his minions).  Then once Boba becomes daimyo himself, he almost never shows that edge again.  He wiped out Stormtroopers like no one's business, killed Bib, and then inconsistently, he hesitates when people outright betray him and disrespect him.  That's inconsistency.

It's actually a lot more consistent than you make it out to be because his primary motivator in The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett's flashbacks is revenge.

He'd reformed and become a chill dude while living among the Sand People, only going back into the killing business to take revenge for his adoptive tribe being wiped out.  He killed the daimyo and a bunch of his subordinates because the real killers left another gang's calling card at the scene of the crime and he didn't question it at all.  He killed the daimyo and the biker gang to whom the emblem belonged in the name of revenge for his murdered tribe and, with his mission complete, returned to peaceful living because he believed justice had been carried out.  It wasn't until later, when he met Cad Bane, that he learned he'd shot the wrong men and got a chance to shoot at the right men.

 

15 hours ago, Mog said:

Reva's motivations were driven by plot instead of character.  She witnessed the slaughter of her fellow Padawans, and yet she had no qualms sending Leia, a mere child, to get tortured.  And then once she has the chance to kill Vader's son, she couldn't go through with it.  That's inconsistency.

Considering how often "there is still some good in <dark side user>" is a thing, this strikes me as a very silly complaint indeed.  Especially when we're talking about someone even more damaged than the usual dark side user.  We're talking about a brainwashed PTSD sufferer powered by Evil Makes You Crazy.

 

15 hours ago, Mog said:

With Luke, we could argue till the cows come home.  Where you argue in support of his more recent trauma, I look back at a dude that never hesitated to rescue his friends and a person that actually succeeded in saving and turning his evil father back to the light.  And yet this same Luke showed zero concern, once he found out that Han died?

Luke knows that there is an actual goddamn afterlife and can speak with (and get hit by) the dead... he's kind of short on reasons to be terribly upset.  Especially since he himself is terribly depressed and waiting to die.

 

15 hours ago, Mog said:

Regarding stupid plots, do the powers that be at Disney really need someone to say that having to rescue Leia twice is redundant in the Obi series?  Or that rescuing Leia by hiding her under an ill-fitting trench coat is beyond silly?

It's Star Wars, man... multiple rescues are the norm, and silliness and a strained-at-best relationship with common sense is the order of the day.  Luke gets rescued three times in Empire alone.

 

15 hours ago, Big s said:

A lot of the problems here are the same problem with all of Disney owned franchises. Willow for example is the newest one where you revisit old heroes, but they’re not heroes anymore. They’re somehow messed up and almost nonfunctional [...]

Yeah it's a passing-the-torch sort of story... but the cast of Willow was already dysfunctional as all get-out in the original movie.  They have NOT changed much.  

 

15 hours ago, Big s said:

The great thing about A New Hope is that we meet a real hero that had been in hiding. He doesn’t dwell on past mistakes, he teaches wisdom and skill to Luke and that’s what made him a great character. If there had never been any prequel or side stories, he would have been remembered as a great retired hero/teacher.

Who are you kidding?  His whole schtick in the OT is that he's in hiding because he F'ed up and his student went over to the dark side and became a 7'2" tyrannical asthmatic gimp and lying to his final student to avoid admitting that he F'ed up in the hopes that he'd tie up the loose ends by killing his own father.

 

15 hours ago, Big s said:

Now all we get are shows and movies where they bring back a beloved character and he has to be broken and twisted in a way that makes everyone gag.

Welcome to Growing Old™.  

 

15 hours ago, Big s said:

Mando was great because he wasn’t a messed up relic of the past and Andor ended up being pretty good because he wasn’t getting taught by a washed up main character.

Like I said, if there's a pattern to Disney Star Wars's success... it's forget the main movies, focus on original stories.

The Mandalorian can do better by distancing itself from its obsession with fanservice and focusing on developing its original characters.  As it is, because the connections to the films are largely cosmetic, it's far better off than most other projects that are just repeating the same mistakes the old Expanded Universe made.

[Mog]

51 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

It's actually a lot more consistent than you make it out to be because his primary motivator in The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett's flashbacks is revenge.

He'd reformed and become a chill dude while living among the Sand People, only going back into the killing business to take revenge for his adoptive tribe being wiped out.  He killed the daimyo and a bunch of his subordinates because the real killers left another gang's calling card at the scene of the crime and he didn't question it at all.  He killed the daimyo and the biker gang to whom the emblem belonged in the name of revenge for his murdered tribe and, with his mission complete, returned to peaceful living because he believed justice had been carried out.  It wasn't until later, when he met Cad Bane, that he learned he'd shot the wrong men and got a chance to shoot at the right men.

Umm. . .What?

Bib Fortuna was the current daimyo, but nothing in any of those flashbacks showed him betraying or screwing over Boba.

That biker gang (that was framed for Tusken’s murders) was never once shown to be associated with Bib or Jabba’s crew.

So, why kill Bib to become daimyo and then later hesitate when others outright screw you over and defy you?

And that bashing in the Stormies and wrecking them completely during the Mandalorian?  Yes, quite chill and reformed for the old bounty hunter.  What “revenge” was he going for with the Stormtroopers and the remanent of the Empire?

Again, inconsistency.

You can have a Boba that still has an edge but wants to do things a little different.

But the writers pivoted way too hard on this kinder, gentler version of Boba in BOBF.  There were ways to show Boba changed without completely removing all the toughness and hardness that would come from his life as a bounty hunter or living with the Tuskens.

[sh9000]

Agreed with @Bolt.

[Big s]

7 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Yeah it's a passing-the-torch sort of story... 

There’s passing the torch, but in the usual Disney storyline it’s find the broken pieces of the torch, mend it, relight it it and then pass it on

 

7 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Who are you kidding?  His whole schtick in the OT is that he's in hiding because he F'ed up and his student went over to the dark side and became a 7'2" tyrannical asthmatic gimp and lying to his final student to avoid admitting that he F'ed up in the hopes that he'd tie up the loose ends by killing his own father.

After watching the ot , I never really thought of Obi as a failure. He seemed to me like he was just protecting Luke from getting side tracked and possibly giving in to the dark side. It wasn’t until the prequels came out that I thought of him as a bit of a failure or Vader as a spoiled whiny b..ch. The obi show really made him out to be an absolute train wreck and Vader to be a total failure every time he tried to do something epic.
And now after your quote I’m wondering if there’s a background scene or two where palpatine is asking someone to bring out the gimp whenever he needs a laugh and watch Vader fail again 

Edited January 19, 2023 by Big s

[Dobber]

7 hours ago, Big s said:

There’s passing the torch, but in the usual Disney storyline it’s find the broken pieces of the torch, mend it, relight it it and then pass it on

 

After watching the ot , I never really thought of Obi as a failure. He seemed to me like he was just protecting Luke from getting side tracked and possibly giving in to the dark side. It wasn’t until the prequels came out that I thought of him as a bit of a failure or Vader as a spoiled whiny b..ch. The obi show really made him out to be an absolute train wreck and Vader to be a total failure every time he tried to do something epic.
And now after your quote I’m wondering if there’s a background scene or two where palpatine is asking someone to bring out the gimp whenever he needs a laugh and watch Vader fail again 

That made me think of this classic skit from RobotChicken

 

[Big s]

Definitely a classic 

[TangledThorns]

Wild that Pedro Pascal is starring in two big series on streaming.