Tag: The Mandalorian

Posted on

Reviews

I got to see an early screening of the new Dungeons & Dragons movie, Honor Among Thieves.

It’s a fun movie.  Knowledge of the game isn’t needed, though players will definitely get more out of watching this movie.

That’s not to say the movie can’t/won’t be enjoyed by non-players.  It’s almost structured like a Marvel movie, in the way the movie sets everything up, from the setting, to the characters, to the reveal of/by the big bad.

One particular group cameo made me smile a lot.

Having only seen two movies so far this year, this one was more fun than Quantumania.  This one I actually want to see again.

Recommended!  Two thumbs up!

—

So far, so good for The Mandalorian Season 3.

Halfway through and we’ve had a lot of stuff happen to Din Djarin and Grogu, not to mention to Bo-Katan and Dr. Pershing.

And we have yet to see Moff Gideon.

Looking forward to the back half of the season.

Posted on

The Mandalorian Season 2: Reactions

Chapter 9: OH SHIT A KRAYT DRAGON
Chapter 10: HEY THAT’S APPA
Chapter 11: HOLY CRAP BO-KATAN
Chapter 12: ARE THOSE SNOKE CLONES?
Chapter 13: OMG AHSOKA
Chapter 14: BOBA FUCKING FETT IS BACK
Chapter 15: That poor Shoretrooper
Chapter 16: IS THAT REALLY HIM IT CAN’T BE NO WAY WAIT MAYBE IT IS HIM HOLY SHIT IT IS AND THERE’S R2

Posted on

Fett

Everyone knows that Han Solo is my favorite Star Wars character, period.

And everyone knows that a close second is Boba Fett.  So much so that I’ve always seen him as a hero, not a villain.  The guy is just trying to get paid by whoever hires him.

Even though he was paid to capture favorite character number one in The Empire Strikes Back.

Anyways, when Return of the Jedi came out, even I thought that Fett went out stupidly, knocked into the sarlacc by a blind scoundrel a.k.a. favorite character number one.

But I never thought he was dead.

I always believed that his armor would protect him and somehow he’d escape the sarlacc.

And for 37 years I never waivered from that belief, even when so many people would try to convince me otherwise.

Then came The Mandalorian.

The show featured a character dressed like favorite character number two; indeed, he did everything that I always thought that character would be capable of doing, Baby Yoda aside.

This season, however, they took a turn toward rewarding my belief in that character, first by casting the last person to voice him in the revised Special Editions, and who played his Dad in Attack of the Clones, in a cameo in the first episode of the season that featured his iconic armor.

And then they revealed that that was indeed him, first by showing his goddamn awesome spaceship, Slave 1, and then showing him off as a badass warrior without the armor.

And then, he was back in the armor.

And they showed him to be that badass that I always knew him to be, even if just in Expanded Universe stories and my own imagination.

A couple of episodes later, at the end of the season, the biggest surprise of all came, a Christmas present to me as far as I’m concerned.

A separate series on favorite character number two.  I’m extremely excited about this.  Probably more than I was when the Solo movie was announced, or when The Mandalorian was announced.

Thank you, Jon Favreau.

Posted on

Chatty?

Things kinda went quiet around here between the halfway point of The Mandalorian Season 1 and the premiere of The Rise of Skywalker.

Hmph.

I thoroughly enjoyed both, but felt that The Mandalorian stuck the landing for it’s first season and was better than The Rise of Skywalker.

Heck, it was better than the Sequel AND Prequel trilogies, IMHO.

In fact, The Mandalorian ranks up in my top 5 Star Wars entities, in no particular order:

  • Star Wars
  • Rogue One
  • Rebels
  • The Mandalorian
  • West End Games’ Star Wars The Role Playing Game

The Thrawn Trilogy, Dark Empire, Kenner’s Millennium Falcon playset, my Millennium Falcon keychain and Brian Daley’s Han Solo Trilogy are the next 5 in my list of favorites.

Funny how there’s only two movies in all of Star Wars on my top favorites list.

I’ll still watch them all whenever they play on TV, though.

Posted on

Chapter 5

The title of the episode made my jaw drop.

As I though about it later while driving to work, I teared up, because I know Dad would have liked this series, and this episode.

Anyways, The Mandalorian Chapter 5 is everything I’ve ever wanted from a Star Wars TV show.  Familiar locales, a Mando bounty hunter, [redacted], and a plot that was familiar as well, but with a Star Wars flair to it.

Speaking of familiar locales, is it weird that I knew where he was before they confirmed it in the episode?

And as much as I love the little dude, I was glad that there was less Baby Yoda than in all 4 previous episodes.

That other character straight up looked like what I figure I would look like in that universe, right down to his profession.  And fate.

In fact, my head canon now accepts that that WAS me in this episode.  So there.

Thanks, Dave Filoni!

I love this series, probably more than anything else in Star Wars, except Star Wars.

Posted on

Compartmentalization

In Fandom, we all ask who/what are favorites are:

  • Favorite Show
  • Favorite Movie
  • Favorite Character

Each can further be quantified buy genre or specific show or movie, in the case of characters.

In the case of Star Trek, for example, my favorite characters are Spock, Data, and Odo in TOS, TNG, and DS9, respectively.

In Star Wars, my favorites are Han Solo, Boba Fett, Captain Rex, Kanan Jarrus, Jyn Erso, and The Mandalorian.

But if I had to chose an overall favorite in each?

Spock, obviously, for Star Trek.

In Star Wars, it’s trickier, for me, but if pressed on it, Boba Fett would be chosen over Han Solo.

That is, until now.  3 episodes in and The Mandalorian is fast becoming my overall favorite character.  He’s what Boba Fett should have been, had the prequels never been made and his backstory changed from what had been written or speculated.

This comes from a comment/thread on a friend’s timeline on Facebook, where it was asked if Boba Fett was cool or just looked cool.  I replied that some of the Expanded Universe stories with Fett were cool.

I still think Fett is cool, though.  The Mandalorian is simply better.

Posted on

This is the Way

Rarely has a show have me so engulfed that I have tears of joy by the third episode.

Those tears were for something specific in that episode, but still.

The Mandalorian is SO GOOD.

“I gotta get one of those.”

The one thing that annoys me three episodes in is that my Mandalorian action figure is now TOTALLY inaccurate.

Annoying, but I don’t care.

I have spoken.

This is the Way.

Posted on

I Have Spoken

I’m gonna say it:

After one episode, The Mandalorian is my favorite Star Wars since the original film.

It’s everything I’ve wanted from Star Wars since I was 10 and 11: it’s a Star Wars TV series AND it’s got a guy who looks like the guy that I liked from the cartoon in The Star Wars Holiday Special.

Seriously, I’ve wanted a TV version of Star Wars since I saw the original movie.  I even imagined episode descriptions as listed in TV Guide, like “Artoo gets captured by the Jawas again.”

And Boba Fett has been my second favorite character since I first saw him in that animated short in 1978.

I’ve gotten lots of shit from people over the years because Fett was a ‘do nothing’ character, much like Captain Phasma in the newer films.  But like Phasma, Boba Fett was a much better character in other media, like comics and novels, and my own imagination.

My gaming group actually met Boba Fett during one scenario, where my bounty hunter character called in a favor from him.

It was the look, and the mystery of Fett and his Mandalorian armor, that made him one of my favorites.

And even back then, and through the years, I never let other people’s opinion’s about him change my fandom.

If there’s one thing I actually hate about the prequels, it’s the way they changed the back story of Boba Fett, making him the son a guy who was the original clone of the Clone Wars.  No more Jaster Mereel, no more Mandalorian background except for the armor.

Which brings us to now, where this new Mandalorian character is everything Boba Fett SHOULD had been, but wasn’t, but it doesn’t matter now because he’s just as much of a badass as I imagined Fett to be in the first place.

Thanks again to Jon Favreau, for breathing life into the side of the Star Wars universe that always appealed to me: bounty hunters and the scum and villainy of the underworld in a galaxy far, far away.

Posted on

Soon

With the impending premiere of The Mandalorian, I’ll be able to pick my favorite Star Wars characters from film, animation, comics, and now live action TV.

Currently my top threes:

Film: Han Solo, Boba Fett, Jyn Erso

Animation: Kanan Jarrus, Captain Rex, Ahsoka Tano

Comics: Jaxxon, Doctor Aphra, Beilert Valance

Projected for TV: Mandalorian, IG-11, Cara Dume

To be fair, those are the ones who I have as action figures.

And I find it amusing that there is a bounty hunter in 3 of the 4 lists.  There could have been, but I really didn’t like Cad Bane.

Valance actually pre-dated Boba Fett by a couple of months in 1978.

This was the only ongoing Star Wars material back in the day.  I picked it up from the corner store.  And it was probably the beginning of my obsession with bounty hunters in Star Wars.

And Jaxxon’s on the cover of this issue, too!