Star Wars: The Mandalorian

So it seems canon now that Imperial-era Stormtroopers are terrible shots cos possibly they're all the same mediocre clone, whereas First Order Stormtroopers are more capable cos they're all kidnapped and trained from birth?

I thought troopers weren’t necessarily clones anymore, by the time of the Galactic Civil War (OT) era?

maybe their guns are all shitty. he did shake it and look at it.

Eliza, my first thought was to wonder what your reaction was to that scene would be!

The two incompetent stormtroopers bit reminded me of the late 90s fan parody TROOPS tbh

Closing two episodes really made this after a couple of nondescript moments in the middle. Never bad, just sometimes underwhelming.

The fan service in this was way more satisfying than that in TROS.

Prequel-era troopers: Jango Fett clones
Imperial-era troopers: Human conscripts and volunteers
First Order-era troopers: Kidnapped children

The Clone Troopers are shown, on the "Star Wars: Rebels" animated series, to look like this by just a couple of years before ANH thanks to their accelerated aging.

https://thewookieegunner.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/star-wars-rebels-season-two-the-lost-commanders-captain-rex-commander-wolffe-gregor.jpg?w=950

starwarslemonparty.png

apparently it is not canon that this was Rex, but I want to believe
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Nik_Sant

Thanks Eliza. I misremembered.

I loved how the ex-clone Stormtroopers were used in Rebels

this was a lot of fun

I think I enjoyed it the most out of any of the new Star Wars stuff (aside from maybe Rogue One)

just felt so unburdened by not being this Major Addition to the Star Wars Movie Canon

also Baby Yoda is amazing, obviously very cute but also it's the only element of the new stuff that really "feels* like the original trilogy, it's got that oddball, hokey, almost homemade quality to it that is really endearing

I agree, also, Taikia Waititi should direct more of the next season, or maybe the entire thing.

I’m a little surprised that Din has never heard of the Jedi, considering that he came of age (and trained with the Mandalorians) during the era when the Jedi were still active.

I think he’s younger than that? the final purge he mentions presumably follows the action they’re going to show in cartoons soon, and that was nearly concurrent with the jedi all being killed.

so the jedi get mostly killed, he’s raised by mandalorians before the empire cracks down on them a final time, and he’s in an expatriate group his entire life

Fair play to PP for looking like absolute shit during the brief helmet reveal.

this wound up nicely though i wish they hadn't taken the mask off that old lone ranger

i've definitely come around on the music here, the theme is as good as GoT was as getting you in the right mindset. I still wish they'd dial it back a bit so that it doesn't blow the rest of the sound out of the water but maybe that's my teevee

was discussing this with a friend who hadn't seen it (who, sidenote, was designing a stein with the mandalorian insignia on commission) and wanted to know if baby yoda was THE yoda and I did the whole "no-real-yoda-died-earlier-in-the-saga" bit and digressed with the comment that there's no known race of "yodas" but that the prior yoda and this one appear to be some sort of figures of power that appear occasionally in the star wars world and she said "oh so it's like the dalai lama" and i was SO embarrassed i hadn't made that connection but now i'm hard pressed not to see "baby yoda" as "reincarnated yoda"

btw based on their costuming, the group that rescued our intrepid hero as a child was specifically the Death Watch. If you aren't familiar with them, get ready for a ride.

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Death_Watch

xp there was one other Jedi of his species on the council... Yaddle

Also Yoda was still alive when The Child was born.

he's not a tame lion yoda

re the helmet reveal, how do you get a weatherbeaten face if you literally never expose it to the elements?

When he goes home at night he takes off his helmet and then has droids blast him in the face with Hurricane force wind and debris, so he will look epic if ever demasked.

Naturally he destroys these droids every night so that's why his bills are so high

story checks out

xp i skipped more than half of the new films (i.e. anything post original trilogy) and kinda barely engaged with the ones I saw; even so i assume there can be multiple incarnations of the bodhisattva? and that the yoda species are the chosen host forms?

morrisp: do we know for sure that the timeline has baby yoda alive at the same time as old yoda? is there an argument to be made that the child comes to full fruition only when the last incarnation passes and that explains its slow genesis? am i going to hell for asking these questions?

lol at "yaddle" btw

the show takes place ~5 years after return of the jedi and the baby is 50 years old so yeah they were alive for ~45 years simultaneously

so we can assume the child was swaddled in a exogorth silk cocoon* that it only emerged from when yoda passed, hence the sudden rush to find it. it's all obvious if you think about it.

*cocoon sold separately

A who what now

http://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/starwars/images/6/65/SpaceslugAnat-woswfg.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/fBoRSBm.png

can i just say how amazed i am that they've managed to suppress any and all pictures of the puppeteers of baby yoda for so long? Can someone provide me visual evidence that it IS a puppet? I mean I get that it's a mix of puppet and CGI but disney has somehow managed to make sure no one has seen any of the imagineering for the past few months and that's a real feat!

also, apropos of nothing, here's a fun alternate universe:

The Yoda puppet in The Empire Strikes Back was controlled by puppeting legend Frank Oz, who in his career not only controlled and voiced the Star Wars icon but also characters like Miss Piggy, Cookie Monster and some of the many creatures from the film Labyrinth. However, that character too was nearly not a puppet. According to J.W. Rinzler's book The Making of The Empire Strikes Back, the character was nearly portrayed by a trained monkey in a costume.

However, a crew member who had worked on the ape sequences at the start of 2001: A Space Odyssey reportedly warned them about all the trouble a monkey would cause on set, leading them to abandon the idea.

YODA: That is why you fail.
- YODA flings shit at LUKE -

"Fuck this. going home to Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen"

"Dead, that are."

"Be that as it may..."

*they

most of the time you only see his face so he’s likely 90% remote controlled facial servos

I think the arm movements are all manual puppeteer movements because he only does them in close-up

For the scenes where he’s being punched or dropped, they used a human toddler in a rubber suit.

That makes sense

I want to know what kind of gigantic food sources the space slug happens to drift by that it needs a mouth like an orca but known whatever wookiepedia tells me will be disappointing

Really liked this piece. It touches on some things my girlfriend's noted (she loves the series deeply).

https://io9.gizmodo.com/i-never-knew-how-much-i-needed-a-star-wars-tv-series-be-1840725748

the show had a massive $15 million budget per episode

still, the speeder bike troopers sequence at the start of the last episode was great. Bendis-y dialogue works well in live action star wars universe shocker.

I should watch Rebels then, I guess.

This was a blast IMO. Favorite bits were the A-Team episode, the prisoner heist, and the siege in the last ep. The whole western-meets-samurai movie worked well and the lack of interest in an overly complicated overarching plot were positives. All the bounty hunters looked cool, and Mando was a sufficient badass but not so much so that he didn't get in way over his head pretty regularly. Herzog was great, Esposito was unexpected. I irl lol'd with Weathers' "he's trying to eat me" line. Not paying any attention to this pre-release really made it a fun surprise.

I was today years old when I learned that the aw shucks nice guy that Buffy befriended on her first day of college who was immediately turned into a vampire was played by a 24-year-old PEDRO PASCAL pic.twitter.com/5q7jAZiDWm

— Brett White (@brettwhite) December 31, 2019

The stuff with Amy Sedaris reminded me of the Holiday Special (in a good way).

I’d like to think she styled her own hair

kinda wish she'd just gone full Jeri Blank on it, overbite and everything.

I flew through the season this weekend. imo this is the closest a SW property has gotten to the tone of the originals: the adventure, the half-explained culture/mysticism, and also not afraid to slow down the pace (something the new trilogy really missed). I couldn't believe how bad the three middle less-plotty eps were in comparison to the rest though, like below-average eps of Farscape. I guess the prison break one was ok. If they can tighten the quality next season, this could be a truly excellent show

I liked this much more than any Star Wars film I’ve seen - though I didn’t watch any post phantom menace.

You liked it much more than the original movies? That’s certainly a take!

you know what, i'll cosign that take! Maybe not the first time I saw them, but I like the best of the mandalorian more than i like the best of SW1 or whatever the fuck the numbering system is.