When Disney+ announced that Jon Favreau was going to set to work on a Star Wars-based show, The Mandalorian, fans awaited the outcome with bated breath. It was going to be Star Wars’ first foray into live-action on the small screen, all the look and excitement of the movies, but in the comfort of the living room week after week.
Some wondered about the desire to make a show about a generic Mandalorian instead of a fan-favorite character like Boba Fett who had been resurrected in the previous (and now discarded) Expanded Universe to go on a series of adventures set after he had long since died in the cinematic version.
The Genesis
After Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm in 2012, everyone waited to see what was going to happen to the long-running and popular Star Wars franchise. Reactions had been mixed on Lucas’s own prequel trilogy, more favorable toward his animated television output, and people were hyped for inexplicably popular director J.J. Abrams being announced as starting off a new sequel trilogy that promised a return of classic characters (and no Jar-Jar Binks) which pretty much guaranteed a positive reaction, opinions on quality aside.
Disney kept up with the animated series end of Star Wars with Rebels and Resistance, but after the new films turned out to be a mixed bag of reactions, none universally positive, it was the announcement that Jon Favreau, the man who’d kicked off the hugely popular Marvel Cinematic Universe with Iron Man all the way back in the long-long-ago of 2008 that got fans excited for what was going to happen next. Favreau promised fans a look at a side of Star Wars they’d never seen before, the underworld that had only been glimpsed in the movies and mostly with bounty hunters, be it Jango Fett and his pyramid scheme in Episode 2, or Darth Vader’s gathering aboard his Executor to hunt down Han Solo in Episode V.
Fan Speculation
Favreau announced his show, The Mandalorian, and speculation began immediately, along with people wondering why that character. Mandalorians, a warrior culture in the Star Wars universe embodied in live-action by Jango Fett and his clone-son Boba Fett, two bounty hunters who prove goofier than dangerous (and both of whom die due to jetpack malfunctions), were focused on more in the Clone Wars animated series in which the war on their planet is first seen, how they opposed the Jedi, were drawn into the greater Galactic conflict, and so on. Viewers learn their codes, about the Dark Saber (a sort of Mandalorian Excalibur), and how they end up where they are eventually seen again.
In the now-excised Expanded Universe, Boba Fett had long ago made his way out of the Sarlacc pit, and gone onto his own series of comics as writers and creators worked in George Lucas’s playground to fill out all the unexplored details of the universe he created way back in 1977. When it was revealed that this new, unknown Mandalorian would also be a mysterious, armored bounty hunter, hanging out in the underworld of the Star Wars universe—fans wondered why they’d go in that direction if the creators were making simply making a new Boba Fett instead of something original altogether.
Star Wars was no stranger to Xeroxing its own characters. The EU had endless Han Solo clones (Kyle Katarn, Dash Rendar, and Talon Karrde being a few) and the new sequels were copying characters with Rey as a female Luke Skywalker and Poe as a wise-cracking hotshot pilot, a now-official Solo copy. One side held that by making the character NOT Boba Fett, there’d be none of the baggage, none of the prequelitis Episode 2 had infected the classic (now clone) character with. There’s something to the idea as blank slates can have their own adventures free of previous canon. However, the show would immediately pull the rug out from under the blank slate it had supposedly provided itself with.
The Execution
The Mandalorian himself, newly minted Din Djarin, had his past revealed when the creators—Favreau alongside Dave Filoni, from the Clone Wars animated series—had his toddler self being rescued by Mandalorians while fighting Super Battle Droids, putting the audience smack back in the middle of the Clone Wars and giving the character a Fett-like backstory of a tragic childhood followed by training at hands of a violent warrior sect. When the series begins the Mandalorian is a full Western-style bounty hunter, brutal and unflinching and then, after battling an IG droid (something Boba Fett does in the original EU, another mark in the “This shoulda been Boba” column), the first episode ends with the Mandalorian rescuing the Child, which is supposed to be the start of softening this hardened man.
The issue with that is that softening a character the audience doesn’t know means that all the past that softening entails is made of what the audience imposes on him with their knowledge of Mandalorians and of the two most famous bounty hunting ones to wear the same armor, Jango and Boba. Moreso, since the setting for the episode is a planet almost-exactly-like-but-not-quite Tatooine, where Boba Fett met his (temporary) end. Had the character been Boba Fett from the start, the ruthlessness being softened would have had weight as the fans already had an idea of who Boba Fett was so a new side to the man under the old dented green helmet would have been an actual revelation.
The series comes closest to making the character a blank slate in the first season, one that’s more dependent on building a father-son relationship between these two disparate beings, Din and the Child, than season 2. Season 2 plays much more like something that’s halfway between fanfic (even if those fans are now making “official” Star Wars product) and a series of “backdoor pilots” (where an established series has an episode that sidelines the leads in favor of side characters the creators hope to spin off into their own shows) by having a series of revolving guest stars in the episodes, two of whom, Boba Fett, and Ahsoka Tano, both got their own series. Boba Fett's series finally landed on Favreau’s initial promise of dealing with the underworld of the Star Wars universe whereas Din Djarin found himself entering more and more into the main Skywalker saga complete with a CGI recreation of young Mark Hamill as a just post-Return of the Jedi Luke Skywalker.
Where Does It Go From Here?
The Book of Boba Fett spin-off of The Mandalorian has the two team up for the finale, pairing Mando with Boba to take on a criminal syndicate on Tatooine, an action-packed idea that is both exhilarating and like a child bringing two nearly identical toys together. There’s room for the characters to go their separate ways, since Favreau and Filoni have given Boba Fett over to the criminal side of the Galaxy and put Din Djarin into the Skywalker-related, larger adventure side of it, but they need to keep the two separate. More mixing and Din Djarin will come off as the increasingly thin shadow of Fett fans first assumed he would be.