Photo credit: www.bbc.co.uk
If you grew up a fan of Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar Movies or anything Disney related, then Tuesday November 12, at midnight was the equivalent to Christmas Morning to you(so basically, if you didn’t live under a big rock of ice your entire childhood).
Disney+, Disney’s brand new streaming service, is finally up and running. It offers customers ALLLLLL OF THE DISNEY CONTENT! The Incredibles? Check. Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back? Check. Guardians of the Galaxy? Check. THE SIMPSONS!? Check(Trust me, that one is just as weird to me too).
But, Disney+ isn’t just going to give you all your favorites. They’re going to give you the new goods too. Their first foray into the original series business is “The Mandalorian”. Directed by Jon Favreau, the man who also directed “Iron Man” and the live-action “Lion King”, “The Mandalorian” is set five years after the events of “Star Wars: Return of the Jedi” and follows along a bounty hunter named Mando.
Mando doesn’t really say much during the episode. If you’re familiar with Star Wars lore, you know that mandalorians wear these gigantic helmets, so you’re not getting much facial expressions either. But what this show lacks in general, normal human qualities, it makes up for in Star Wars stuff.
The show starts with Mando collecting a bounty on a sandy planet where he finds his prize in a, you guessed it, a cantina! While the show commits to some familiar Star Wars tropes and uses CGI to show off impressive landscapes from different far away planets, this is not your typical Star Wars story.
There is no word of Jedi or Sith. This is the grimy part of Star Wars. This is about a bounty hunter who lost his family at a young age and is working underground to survive, albeit while working for some people with questionable character and intentions. The show has an old western vibe to it, following our lone ranger anti-hero who by the end of the episode is faced with a decision that is going to ultimately test his morality for the remainder of the series.
If you are looking for a show to fulfill the appetite you have for the Star Wars universe but are tired of the same Jedi/Skywalker storylines that the movies thus far have relied on, this show is for you. The first episode is lacking in action, but one can assume that’s going to pick up as the season goes along. It’s Star Wars after all!
But, the first action provokes a lot of questions about our main character and provides the structure of this new universe that Favrreau is operating in. And don’t worry, you’ll know the greater Star Wars ramifications when you see them, and it creates the groundwork for an interesting series that we get to see unfold over the next two months.
If you have the time, $6.99 for a month or a friend who you can mooch off of, I recommend checking out Disney+ and especially “The Mandalorian” if you are a fan of Star Wars. Episode 2 will be released this Friday, November 15. A new episode will be released every Friday with the exception of December 20, the date that “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” is released. That episode will be released on Wednesday December 18. The season finale will be released on December 27. There will be a total of eight episodes.
This is not your typical streaming show that you can binge in a week. Disney+ is releasing it on a weekly basis to counter the Netflix strategy of binge watching your shows. That’s right, you have to WAIT for your television like in the good ole days!
Give “The Mandalorian” and the rest of Disney+ a shot. For an enthusiast of any Disney properties, it’s a must have and if the first episode of “The Mandalorian” is anything like the other original content Disney is planning on putting out(WandaVision, Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Hawkeye, etc.), Disney will be controlling your streaming content lives for the foreseeable future.
All hail Disney!
Jake Majka writes about a bunch of good stuff for Black Squirrel Radio. Check out his work by clicking on his name at the top of any of his articles, and listen to his show “Baking News” from 10 p.m. to 12 a.m. Wednesdays on blacksquirrelradio.com