The inevitable release of an animatronic baby yoda toy is going to cause toy stores and online retailers to implode.

 

Build-A-Bear workshop is going to release them soon. That ought to be absolute bedlam not seen since Cabbage Patch Kids came out.

 

It'll be millenials en masse rushing the stores. Watch out for your toddlers.

 

I cannot comprehend people who buy these types of things...

 

You cannot comprehend people buying cute things?

...really?

 

...I don't buy cute things. I don't pretend to be right, or in the majority or anything, I just never understood buying plushies of things like pikachu or baby Yoda etc. And their popularity boggles my mind.

 

It's a squishy toy that is safe for kids and doubles as decor in the right circumstances. Whats difficult to understand?

 

I didn't think this was that good. It started out with amazing promise but as the series went on I just felt it kept failing to live up to it.

On a positive note, I am absolutely blown away and amazed that we are at a point where we can have a sci-fi show on a streaming network and it looks this good. Making a show that looks merely not cheesy would've been enough, but I thought Mando looked genuinely beautiful. Great production value, great job melding real sets with generated backgrounds (Favreu said the tech used to make the Lion King 2019 backgrounds is used in this series, so we got *something* good from that movie), great use of models and puppets. I really liked that.

However the plotting left so much to be desired. As we moved further away from the episodic nature of the show and more and more into the overall plot -- why Werner wants the kid, what Mando is going to do about it -- I just became less and less invested.

I felt like the last three episodes were meant to build up to something, but there was no tension. Herzog dies unceremoniously, a new Mof arrives who has no sense of presence or threat -- really, where's the tension when this guy is too afraid to rush into a bar with three people when he has a platoon of soldiers surrounding the outside. Oh, the try a gatling gun that doesn't work. Now they try a flamethrower guy that doesn't work.

I don't know, I just felt like Gideon had no threat, and honestly neither did Herzog because he only had like two scenes. So any time the show tried to expand its scope from the single-episode bad guys outwards into the bigger bads, I didn't care for it at all.

I don't know the general feeling on this, but I really didn't like the prison escape episode. On one hand it's so easy to guess they're going to betray him because they are just relentless dicks to Mando from start to finish, on the other hand you're not really worried because Mando is just so much more competent. So this band of toughs just doesn't feel threatening at all. I didn't like the Twi'lek actors' choices to go so campy with them. Why is 'hissing' an acceptable character trait to signify "these guys are aliens?"

Bill Burr took me out of it. I like him in Breaking Bad, don't care for anything else I've seen him in, and was just annoyed at him here.

Anyway yeah I'm pretty negative on it overall. I felt it didn't earn the Mando attempted self-sacrifice at the end, especially because the Robot so easily saved him. Mostly great performances and as I said good production design but not really enough to draw me back in for a season two.

 

50$ dress socks from a theme park.

100% Worth.

 

So I watched the first 2 episodes, which are all thats available over here just now. And honestly, I don't understand the hype. Its fine. There's nothing overtly bad about it. But its not amazing by any stretch of the imagination. All the hype about it led me to expect something better.

 

I do think that the baby Yoda twist was at least half the fun for me. If you see it coming and if you've already seen all the memes, I bet that takes a lot of the delight out of it.

 

Oh, I'm so incredibly tired of baby yoda already, just from the memes.

 

At the end of the day, The Mandalorian is just a solidly good show for a fandom that's been bereft of unambiguously good content for thirty years. It's not exceptional in any particular way (aside from the casting IMO), but it's pretty good along all axes, with a tone and style very reminiscent of the original trilogy, and Star Wars fans haven't seen that in a long time.

That's most of the reaction. Then you add on top of that Baby Yoda being adorable and the internet's general response to cute things and you have the rest of it.

 

Watch episode 3 and get back to me. That's when the hype really started to take off.

 

So Rosario Dawson was cast as Ahsoka for season 2.

I'm so fucking here for it.

 

Yep. I can't believe I actually lived to see a fan-casting top pick actually happen. What a time to be alive.

 

And there's another casting.

Boba Fett is returning and played by the same dude from the Prequels, Temuera Morrison


https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/mandalorian-finds-boba-fett-temuera-morrison-1293675

 

If he's on board for this, maybe we'll get a live-action Rex too. Although he'd probably need to done some old man makeup for that.