I was kind of worried that there would be bloat, but this last episode was excellent. While still being full of tons of references to all sorts of stuff from the video games and the animated shows and the Extended Universe and whatnot. I’m starting to wonder why the hell they just didn’t do all of this instead of all the movies except Rogue One (and, dammit, Solo). Alas, time travel is impossible and unethical.
5 thoughts on “Halfway through, and THE MANDALORIAN continues To Not Suck.”
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Kathleen Kennedy .
She explicitly does not like boy-oriented action/adventure stories.
She excised the Extended Universe from canon because of that.
Because she does not like that kind of story, and because she is a Dunning-Krueger case study, she’s never actually bothered to familiarize herself with the Extended Universe.
The writers volunteering to work on Star Wars properties (especially the minor bits) will necessarily have a high concentration of fanboys.
Writers in that position will naturally try to mitigate executive meddling, and will try to get crap past the radar.
This is amplified by Disney taking it in the shorts by having many of its profit centers neutralized by reasons pandemic or politic. Under normal circumstances, Kennedy would likely crush the rebellion. But given her track record of failure and the success of the show, not to mention that upper management is looking at an axe likely to remove a few expensive heads…
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And in Star Wars, the rebels win.
I’ll echo Luke here and say this: Priorities. We look at entertainment as a way to be entertained first and foremost. They entertain us and we give them money. Conversely, a lot of ‘entertainment’ properties these days are controlled by people whose priority is to reinforce a certain worldview and ‘inform’- and they think if they do a good job of informing us, we will give them money.
.
There is a world of difference in those two motives.
Their desire to “inform” is not even the problem. If the last 12 years have taught me anything, it is this: The People™ do not, in fact, mind being lied to. Quite oposite, they demand it. What they mind is being lied to *poorly* [which is also partly where the cause of Teh New Posting Rules comes from.]
Even dirty commies can tell a good story. Our commies just suck.
I thought last night’s episode was possibly the weakest, so far. But everyone’s got their own opinions and expectations.
A year or two ago there was a rumor that Iger was looking to get rid of Kennedy. The problem mentioned was finding a replacement for her. The replacement has to be someone who has some standing in the business because, well, it’s Star Wars. Letting an untested neophyte screw it up will be bad for Disney in many ways, and not just because of the immediate financial losses. But at the same time, you’re not going to be able to get the best people running the property because, well, it’s Star Wars, and they’d probably rather be creating their own franchise rather than working on one that’s long established, and has a lot of baggage associated with it that limits what they can do creatively.
Loved the episode. Seeing Ashoka, and then the name drop at the end was fantastic. Hearing Ashoka’s theme gave me chills.
Disney Star Wars Scorecard:
The Good:
Season 7 Clone Wars
Star Wars Rebels
The Mandolorian
Rogue One
The Okay:
Solo
The Bad:
The 3 sequels.
Undecided:
Star Wars Resistance(I never watched).
3 out of the 4 of the good ones were all created or had involvement of Dave Filoni. He created CW(along with Lucas), Rebels, and he is very involved with The Mandolorian.
I would be very happy if he was put in charge of the Star Wars properties(movies, TV, etc) going forward. He seems to really care about Lucas’ original vision.
Heck, he has even improved the prequels, with the addition of Clone Wars.
I think that the biggest problem with the sequels was that they were so disjointed from one another. It was clear that there were different creative teams between the 3 movies. There was no one over the whole project. It Abrams, then Johnson, then Abrams.
Say what you will about the prequels, but that was Lucas’ vision from start to finish. With the Sequels, it was Abrams’ vision, then Johnson, then back to Abrams. The prequels suffered from the opposite problem. No one was there to tell Lucas no.