The Mandalorian and Grogu

We all know that May the Fourth is Star Wars Day, but did you know that just like how there are different dates for Easter and Christmas in the Orthodox Church, there is also "Orthodox Star Wars Day" on 25th May, which is the date Star Wars was originally released in cinemas in 1977? Well, if you didn't know that, now you do. 

A couple of nights ago, on Orthodox Star Wars Day, Cathy and I went to the local Odeon to watch the first Star Wars film to be released for seven years, The Mandalorian and Grogu. (Yes, it really has been seven years. That was a whole pandemic ago!)

This latest Star Wars film is about the Mandalorian bounty hunter, Din Djarin, and his foundling trainee, Grogu, continuing their story from the three TV series of The Mandalorian (and the episodes of The Book of Boba Fett that they rather stole the show in).

Very mild spoilers follow below...

If you haven't seen the TV series, then you might struggle getting into this story. It is quite episodic, with three distinct story chapters that could have been episodes in a fourth series. (There are primers available online to bring you up to speed.)

The Mandalorian is now working for the New Republic, as a contractor bringing in former Imperial generals who are operating as war-lords. This makes narrative sense to me, as the surviving Imperial factions pose the most risk to Grogu, the child in the Mandalorian's care. 

His work for the New Republic brings the Mandalorian into the orbit of the Hutt gangsters who first appeared in The Book of Boba Fett. Carnage ensues. 

I enjoyed watching this but there were moments when it felt a bit indulgent. Dave Filoni, current president of Lucasfilm, uses the film to bring back certain characters he created earlier in his career. Notably, this includes Rotta the Hutt, spawn of Jabba the Hutt. 

Rotta is presented as a complex character trying to emerge from the bloated shadow of his father, but it feels a bit worthy and preachy the way its done. Rotta first appeared in the Clone Wars cartoon series that had a 'moral' for every episode and his story arc feels very Saturday-morning-cartoon.

There are some niche references as well. The INT-4 mini-rig vehicle produced as a toy by Kenner in the early 1980s makes a live action debut. It's the latest in a line of appearances in modern Star Wars media of those early toys that were the product of a toy designer's imagination way back when. 

Another returning character is Zeb, the darkly comedic Lasat from Star Wars Rebels. He was my favourite character in Rebels and it's nice to see he has survived the war against the Empire. He's still serving in the military, though. The war isn't quite over everywhere. 

My favourite callbacks were when the film-makers leaned into the "baby Yoda" idea and had Grogu picking up little Yoda-isms. He spends some time living in a swamp, with a mud hut and a walking stick. Cathy pointed out, there is also a crashed spaceship in the swamp - another Dagobah reference.

There has been some criticism of modern Star Wars - particularly the Mandalorian series - being geared towards 'fan service' (I thought BOBF had too much). But really why not provide some service to the fans? After all, it's the fans that turned this franchise into the behemoth it is. 

Next year it will be a whole half century since the first instalment of Star Wars was released in cinemas. I doubt The Mandalorian and Grogu will have the same cultural resonance, but as a small continuation of what has turned into a cultural movement, it ticks the right boxes. It was a fun movie and made me, a self-confessed fan, happy. 

More reviews

The Mandalorian Season 1

The Mandalorian Season 2 

A conversation about religion in The Mandalorian Season 2

The Book of Boba Fett review 

The Lighter Side of Star Wars

Happy Star Wars Day. I started the celebrations early this year, by collecting the free build of baby Grogu (not Baby Yoda!) from the Lego Store. I had to queue but was entertained by members of the Saber Guild and the Rebel Legion - people who clearly love Star Wars.

I've been thinking recently about the many send ups and spoofs of Star Wars that I've enjoyed over the years. This was prompted by seeing the  Star Wars episodes of Phineas and Ferb as part of our watch through of the show on Disney Plus. I hadn't seen them before this year and they have quickly become some of my favourite Star Wars homages. 

What makes Phineas and Ferb different, to say, the Family Guy retelling of Star Wars, is that instead of the main characters in the TV show assuming the roles of key characters in the films, they set Phineas and Ferb along with their friends and associates in roles around the original story. So Phineas and Ferb live on the next farm to Luke Skywalker, they meet Isabella the star ship captain in the same cantina where Ben and Luke meet Han Solo and Chewbacca, Perry the Platypus is a rebel agent and so on. In this version of the story, Phineas and Ferb are returning the Death Star plans that R2-D2 accidentally dropped in their landspeeder. 

There were several funny knowing gags in the film. Darth Doofenschmirtz 'flushing' after going to the bathroom setting off the trash compactor is one that made me chuckle. The jump scare Tusken Raider made me laugh out loud. A discussion over who started shooting in the cantina prompted knowing nods. There are also some great songs, full of nerd-level jokes. 

I think it was one of the best, and most enjoyable, retellings of Star Wars, and I'm delighted to have discovered it. It was much better than some of the Lego Star Wars shorts that have been made more recently. Those seemed to have been written for kids rather than old fans like me. 

I've already mentioned the Family Guy trilogy of special episodes. I'm not a fan of Family Guy but they had some clever bits. Half the jokes relate to the Family Guy characters so I felt I was missing some of the humour. It's been years since I watched them, though, and I don't really feel any desire to watch them again. 

When I watched the Family Guy Star Wars, I  was making a direct comparison with the Robot Chicken Star Wars series that came out around the same time. Robot Chicken was a lot funnier; a series of short sketches and gags that jumped around the Star Wars universe, sending up particular scenes from the movies and exploring what was happening off-screen. 

The most widely shared Robot Chicken sketch is probably 'Darth Calls the Emperor', showing the phone call that Vader makes to tell the Emperor that the Death Star has been blown up. "What the hell is an aluminum falcon?!?" still makes me laugh despite seeing it numerous times. Other favourite bits include Admiral Ackbar on a game show, the tragic story of Ponda Baba's ruined career as an architect, Max Rebo's greatest hits album, and Admiral Ackbar (again) out for brunch with Mon Mothma. 

Robot Chicken came out before the Disney sequels and TV series and I'd love to see the team have a go at mocking the Disney era. There would be ample material in just The Mandalorian.

But the grandaddy spoof of them all is the film, Spaceballs. Written and directed by Mel Brooks, it's an older film now, but it still checks out. It's very loosely based on Star Wars, sending up the look of the franchise and its impact more than anything else. The main villain wears an outsized black helmet and is known as Lord Dark Helmet. The wise old master of the Schwartz is a small green character (played by Brooks walking on his knees) called Yogurt. There is a whole sequence making fun of merchandising and how the name of the film gets slapped onto everything - then later in the film characters are using Spaceballs-branded merchandise. Lord Dark Helmet plays with Spaceballs action figures at one point.

My brother and I watched Spaceballs multiple times when we were kids. Recently we introduced by eldest niece and nephew to it as well. They found it hilarious too - a real test of how well made it is considering it's a spoof movie. It helps that the special effects were done by the same people who made Star Wars, with George Lucas's blessing. 

I've said before that the escapism of Star Wars, with its simple good v evil plotting, really helped me when I was a child and adjusting to a very big life change. One reason why some of the newer Disney Star Wars projects leave me cold is they deliberately pursue ambiguity, with characters being morally grey and storylines exploring more complicated approaches to the old good guys versus bad guys trope. (Even if, from a certain point of view, that has always been there.)

Star Wars, to me, was always meant to be a bit simple and silly, and I think that's why I enjoy watching silly spoofs of it. My dad would often sum up a film by saying 'It's not to be taken too seriously'. He was right, and the comedy versions of Star Wars help me do that. 

Our scary cute Hallowe'en

Cathy has arranged some suitable toys on our mantelpiece for Hallowe'en.

I particularly like how Jack Skellington is next to Sally... Brown from Peanuts. Is he moving on to a new Sally squeeze? 

This chap is new to the mantel this year.

And the mummified Grogu is also a new addition.

We also have some spookified Cars characters - Luigi and Guido.

A Lego Hallowe'en scene

A vampire mad scientists lab with Frankenstein's monster in Playmobil. (The ghost also lights up!)

A Sylvanian Families little cat in a ghost costume (cuteness overload!)

And a bucket of bats who can zipper their wings together to keep warm!

It might not be very scary but I love our seasonal display of toys!

And if you want to see the mantel on TikTok, you can!

Star Wars Day 2022 – reviewing The Book of Boba Fett

I’ve held off writing a review of The Book of Boba Fett because when the series ended I wasn’t really sure what to make of it. I wanted to have a think about it. And then other stuff happened. But as its Star Wars Day, this feels like a suitable point for a late review.

We don't talk about Fett Club

As a long-time fan of the Star Wars universe, and a collector of Boba Fett action figures (my ‘Fett Club’) I was looking forward to seeing what they did in the series. Particularly as we were going to find out what happened between Boba’s fall into the Sarlacc Pit and his encounters with the Mandalorian who had come into possession of Fett’s armour.

In The Mandalorian TV show Boba didn’t seem so villainous. He was no longer working for the Empire, but was on his own mission, giving service based on honour rather than for money. He had become more than a bounty hunter, in the same way that the Mandalorian was rising above his profession to become the protector of Grogu.

The Book of Boba Fett promised to tell us how that redemptive path had opened up for Boba. And it started really well, Boba dramatically thrusting his way upwards through the sands after he had burned and torn his way through the flesh of the Sarlacc. That made the first episode, with his subsequent capture by Tusken Raiders set up the notion of a man finding his true identity when he had been stripped of everything else.

However, the problem wasn’t in the flashbacks that showed Boba grow into an understanding of loyalty and belonging. The problem the show had was the contemporary setting – Boba’s conflicts ‘now’. Having taken control of Jabba the Hutt’s crime syndicate, he just seemed unable to actually do anything with it.

I have seen that described as the ultimate case of a low-ranking employee thinking they can run the company, only to discover that, in fact, they do not have the skills to do so when they finally get their break. Boba is not a leader, and his desire to rule fuels his failure to gain the respect and status that he covets.

The series itself didn’t help deliver the story. I agree with the comments that the story could have been told in chronological order and it wouldn’t have affected the telling that much. The whole “Dances with Tuskens” storyline of Boba’s spiritual awakening never really chimed with the contemporary action as he established himself as Jabba’s replacement. The murder of his adopted tribe could have been a pivotal turning point in the story, pushing him towards a vengeful streak that culminated in his violent takeover of Jabba’s palace and schemes.

The series set up numerous feints as who Boba’s main opponents were going to be, starting with Jabba’s cousins, who then exited rapidly from the series. They were replaced by the Pyke Syndicate, which was introduced in the film Solo as the operation in charge of the spice mines on Kessel. But they weren’t a particularly exciting opponent even if they did have military grade death robots at their disposal. 

And then there was the peculiar suspension of the storyline to have two episodes almost entirely centred on the Mandalorian and Grogu. This included a sequence of Jedi training for Grogu with Luke Skywalker no less, delving more into the lore of Mandalore and the Darksaber, the Mandalorian getting cast out of his hardcore religious cult as an apostate, and a cameo for Ahsoka Tano where she referenced knowing Luke’s dad. The two episodes were almost standalone and completely derailed what little momentum The Book of Boba Fett had built up.

We also had to sit through egregious levels of fan service. At one point the action was literally The Mandalorian driving a Naboo Starfighter around Beggar’s Canyon on Tatooine, which really felt like the kind of fever dream fan-fic that would be written by an excitable teenager. I didn’t mind Max Rebo turning up having somehow survived Jabba’s sail barge exploding next to the Sarlacc pit. I enjoyed Boba Fett learning to ride a rancor. But some of the nods and references within the show were parachuted in just because the writers could. It gave off a vibe of desperation – as if the show’s writers were running out of ideas and content.

Two big characters making their live action debuts were the Wookiee bounty hunter Krrsantin, who had appeared in various comic books, and Cad Bane, who featured in several storylines in The Clone Wars cartoon series. Neither character was developed much beyond what we already knew. Cad Bane’s late appearance in the series meant the duel with Boba Fett lacked any weight at all. In The Clone Wars, Cad Bane was the protector of the orphaned Boba, and his mentor as Boba grew up. The shoot-out between them should have been a proper cinematic moment instead of something thrown in to pad out the final episode.

And that need for padding, ultimately, is where I feel The Book of Boba Fett really faltered. There was no core drive at the heart of the story. Boba had seized control and the story was what he did next…. except he didn’t really do anything next. There were moments along the way when it looked like things were about to start happening, but then the action stalled.

So, ultimately, this was a really frustrating series. It got hijacked as the staging point for the third series of The Mandalorian, which will now feature the Mandalorian and Grogu together again after they parted at the end of the second season. Personally, I think Boba Fett deserved more of the spotlight from the series that was ostensibly telling his story.

December 2021 - End of month review

This is my final monthly round up for 2021 and my final blog post for the year, taking me up to an annual total of 92 posts.

December for us is dominated by Christmas. We wrote about 120 Christmas cards. Cathy took a picture of me posting a load of them outside our local post office, where the postbox has been decorated by someone with excellent crocheting skills!

There will be a series of posts in January about the 2021 Annual Christmas Card Audit. As cards have arrived, it's been fun seeing who has been trying to get a mention in the ACCA this year!

On the first weekend in December we put up the Christmas tree and decorations. (You can see some of them here.) We also had five advent calendars this year. Last year we didn't bother with the Lego Star Wars one, but this year we did, mainly to get the Christmassy version of the Child star of The Mandalorian, Grogu.

Life has gone on inbetween all the Christmassy stuff. I had an appointment to go and get my booster jab. This time it was in Splott instead of the big centre in the old Toys R Us building. 

There were signs up when I went in saying they were offering the Moderna vaccination, but the leaflet used the brand name, Spikevax. I asked the lady doing the jabs why they weren't using the brand name and was told "because it sounds like something you'd make up!" Technically, all brand names are 'made up', I suppose, but I know what she meant. It's a really silly sounding brand name.

Being boosterised means I should be protected against the omicron variant of the Sar-Cov2 coronavirus. However, as we have been seeing people, we have been doing lateral flow tests to make sure we haven't picked it up anywhere. It occurred to me as I binned yet another baggie of used tests and swabs that there is going to be a 'covid layer' in the landfill sites excavated by future archeologists that will help them accurately date the rubbish they are sifting through.

I had an early surprise present off Cathy when she bought me a box of Captain Crunch cereal. It's the proper American stuff complete with neon bits and that wonderful artificial "fruit" scent that comes with it.

At the start of Christmas week, the Welsh Government announced a ban on spectators at sporting events. The FAW responded by putting football on hiatus until January. At that point, I had only been to one game in December, because of other commitments and Barry Town having to postpone a game. However, that one game, which was between Caerau Ely and Cardiff Draconians, was a landmark game on my Futbology App. 

I was in work right up to Christmas Eve, then Cathy and I had a quiet Christmas Day. Two days later we went up to Shrewsbury and had some days with family before heading home to ring in the New Year. While in Shrewsbury I went to a football match at the Meadow for the first time since March 2020. It was an evening game that ended in a 0-0 draw, but it was so good to be back there! Here is a photo of the team warming up.

I haven't been to many evening games at the Meadow. It always feels a bit special. That was my final game of the year, giving me the following totals on Futbology.

This also doubles as a summary of my season so far as I didn't see any games before July. I'm quite pleased that I've been to a dozen new grounds. 

On the way home from Shrewsbury we stopped and called in at the Hereford Model Centre. I bought myself a present with some Christmas money. This will be the subject of at least one future blog post!

And if the thought of reading about Dungeon Bowl in the New Year doesn't fill you with excitement, then how about this reminder of the next holy holiday that I spotted in a Co-op in Shrewsbury?

That's right! Easter is on its way....

Star Wars Day 2020 - a long review of The Mandalorian

As it’s Star Wars Day I feel this is as good a day as any to review The Mandalorian, the newish series set in the Star Wars universe. 

THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS so I'm posting a picture of my lockdown workstation buddies to break up the text. Read on at your own risk!

Yep, they're Lego!

The Mandalorian is the flagship series on the new Disney Plus streaming service. I’m not saying it’s the only reason we bothered buying Disney Plus, but the way the service launch coincided with the lockdown combined with this series that it feels like half of the geekier end of the Internet has been raving about, made the purchase almost inevitable.

(A sidebar on Disney Plus. Is it worth the money? Kind of. Except we already own most Disney and Pixar films on other formats, along with Star Wars and the better Marvel movies. The rest of the programming isn’t hugely exciting. The Star Wars animated series Clone Wars and Rebels are probably next on my watch list. Despite them saying its all of Disney’s back catalogue there are a couple of omissions – the film ‘Song of the South’, which has a fairly relaxed attitude to slave plantations implying how life as a slave was okay really, isn’t on there. Neither is that famous nature documentary where off-scene riggers literally threw lemmings off a cliff. Maybe that’s for the best.)

Disney have been adding a new episode of The Mandalorian every Friday for the past six weeks, with two available straight away. The eight episode run is now concluded. It was ace. I have to say that right from the start. It had humour. It had believable characters. It kept me hooked week to week.

It’s not a kid’s TV series. That’s not to say it’s hugely gritty or anything. Characters aren't using the f-word and nobody’s injecting narcotics into their eyeballs. There’s no nudity, or even hints at sex. But there is violence and even blood, which you don’t get a lot of in the Star Wars universe. Bad guys die some pretty horrible deaths, including getting tipped headfirst into a smelter, although they do tend to die their horrible deaths mercifully quickly.

The series is set in the aftermath of the Empire’s collapse. There are traces all around. Some Imperial generals have set up as warlords. Some high-calibre weaponry has got into the hands of thugs and thieves. It all feels quite believable – the power vacuum when the dictatorship collapses is something we’ve seen a few times. Ordinary people are trapped by it. The new regime doesn’t really care, or have the means to sort the problem out. There are New Republic X-Wings in one episode. They turn up for their plot point and then disappear. One character is a disillusioned former Rebel Alliance soldier. Even the good guys get jaded.

We learn more about the Mandalorian Warriors. The Clone Wars cartoon series has filled in quite a bit of back story, and this series adds to it. I liked the way it was considered as a creed rather than a race, with its own lore, and honour code. Most of all the Mandalorians were recast as ambiguous, neither good, nor evil, but following their rules. “This is the way,” being their affirmation of a course of action, and signalling agreement with it. The Armourer, who is sort of the sect leader, is a combination of smith and priest, and had some real gravitas.

The lead protagonist is the Mandalorian, a bounty hunter. Other members of the bounty hunter Guild just call him "Mando". We learn a bit about his back story as the series progresses, and his real name in the last episode. But overall he manages to remain a mystery man. He is the character the story follows without the story ever really being about him. I appreciated that. Too many shows rely on character exposition rather than letting you learn about them through observation. 

The main other character is “Baby Yoda”, although that is the name ascribed to the creature by fans rather than in the show. In the script the creature is just ‘the child’ and its origins, race and purpose are a mystery to everyone, except, presumably, the Imperials who are hunting it. I knew about Baby Yoda before watching the show because, like I said, the Internet went nuts about it. I didn’t realise Baby Yoda was going to provide the main story arc of the show. I’m not complaining at all. I love a good mystery, and maybe we will learn something about Yoda along the way.

Other characters are good too. I liked Kuiil (pronounced Queel) the Ugnaught. His way of ending arguments by just saying “I have spoken” has already passed into our household vernacular. They managed to give him a backstory – enslavement by the Empire and earning his freedom – in a few short lines that made him real.

Cara Dune, the jaded former rebel soldier, was a bit less three-dimensional. There’s definitely more in her back story that could be explored, and I’d like to know more about her. IG-11, the assassin droid hunting Baby Yoda, was a character in its own right by the end of the show. I’ve noticed that Droids tend to be expendable in Star Wars spin offs now (Rogue One and Solo spring to mind). Sadly, The Mandalorian continues this theme. 

The Imperial generals are a bit cookie-cutter villains, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing – often a villain trades menace for screen time. It’s the Jaws effect – the less you see of the shark the scarier it is.

There a lot of little background details that probably need several rewatches to get. I thought it as funny seeing the Salacious Crumb creatures being sold for food in the street market. And if you ever wondered what the Cloud City refugee carrying what looked like an ice cream maker was actually carrying, then that was resolved as well. But those details are for the fans and aren’t obtrusive. 

The only thing it would be helpful to know is that the robots in a flashback scene are Super Battle Droids from the Separatist Army in the Clone Wars. But you don’t really need to know that to get what is happening, or why the titular Mandalorian became a Mandalorian Warrior. I also really liked seeing Mos Eisley again.

There wasn’t much I didn’t like about the series. One episode was a bit duff, when the Mandalorian is forced to track down a wild beast. But even that episode has a very important plot point regarding Baby Yoda. The writers have run through a number of tropes though. We’ve had the ‘village in peril needs a gunslinger’ episode, the prison break episode, the ‘blackmailed into a feat of derring do’ episode, and the ‘helping a rookie’ episode. It feels like every science fiction series has the same stock story elements for episodes.

Overall though, despite being set in a well-known and well-worn fictional universe, I felt The Mandalorian had enough new elements and introduced plenty of innovative concepts to seem like it was breaking new ground, rather than rehashing the same old thing. That contrasted a lot with Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker, which I saw around Christmas, which really didn’t offer anything new at all and felt totally bound by the conventions of Star Wars script-writing. (After The Last Jedi had controversially ripped up the blueprint for a Star Wars movie, Episode IX felt like a real let down.)

I feel The Mandalorian benefitted from not revisiting the same old scenes and from showing us something new, or showing us those things in a new way. (Mos Eisley is a big enough place to go back to.) The callbacks to the massive Star Wars back catalogue were subtle and evidence of the care shown by the creative team, but they weren’t included by people trying to show off their fanboy credentials. Blink and you’ll miss them. Those knowing nods are much more satisfying than in some of the cinematic releases, where it often feels they are trying a bit too hard.

So, overall, I really enjoyed The Mandalorian. And I’m a hard guy to please when it comes to modern Star Wars stuff. I know it’s entitlement, but I have been into Star Wars since 1983 so I have high expectations. The Mandalorian met those expectations, and I would say it’s probably worth signing up to Disney Plus even if that’s the only thing you watch on it.