Dave Filoni and The Right Kind of Nostalgia

Over the past years I’ve grown ever so tired of nostalgia. It seems that increasingly we are presented with media that we are meant to enjoy based purely on our fondness for previous media. Now I’m not going to pretend I haven’t thoroughly enjoyed perhaps some the most blatant culprits of this trend in the past but it really is beginning to get tedious isn’t it? As you may have gathered from my previous review, the latest Star Wars movie really was the last straw for that kind of thing. This is a problem that could have easily cropped up in the new and first ever live action Star Wars TV show, The Mandalorian, however I am here to tell you that, although injected with a decent dose of nostalgia, the show doesn’t ever seem to be pandering in that sense and the nostalgia never gets in the way of the substance of the show.

The Mandalorian is a show about a, you guessed it, Mandalorian, which is a warrior culture in the Star Wars universe known for their signature weapons and armour. They have appeared in multiple pieces of Star Wars media but their culture was mainly explored in the animated Clone Wars and Rebels TV shows, show that co-creator of The Mandalorian, Dave Filoni, had a huge hand in creating. It is from Filoni that I believe this sense of what I would call the right kind of nostalgia. He brings such a sense of love for all of Star Wars media to every project he’s worked on and this has always been a huge part of his shows’ success. He manages to craft stories that pay homage to every era of this immense galaxy far far away whilst still being fresh and new at the same time. For example, in The Mandalorian we see cameos from plenty of alien races from the prequels, the original trilogy and the animated shows and rather than feeling like nostalgia porn for the sake of it, it just serves to make the world feel like the same world we’ve been watching this whole time, in fact it links the prequels and originals in a more solid way as they always had completely different aesthetics and the merging of those two aesthetics, along with some things from the new trilogy, really makes the whole franchise feel more cohesive because it shows how those vastly different feeling movies can all exist together.

The problem with the nostalgia presented in a lot of modern media is that it is always presented with comment, there is always a feeling of a wink and a nudge as if to say to the audience, “hey look at this, you remember this don’t you, you like this,” and it often times takes me out of the movie. A huge example of this in Star Wars is in Rogue One when for no reason they all but stop the movie for thirty seconds to get a line from the weird faced man from the Mos Eisley Cantina (the “he doesn’t like you, I don’t like you either,” guy). It doesn’t add to the story or the world building it just makes you stop and come out of the movie to think about what a coincidence it is that they just happened to bump into that guy. The Mandalorian avoids this feeling because its nostalgia factor stems from simply representing the Star Wars galaxy accurately and with all its various creatures and ships and planets, essentially the background things that add up to make the world feel like the Star Wars we know, whether your Star Wars is prequel centric or original trilogy centric or even sequel centric, it accommodates for everyone without feeling patronising.

I’ve often struggled with how the sequel trilogy has created a whole host of new alien designs and ignored any from previous media for, as much as I love seeing new aliens, it does make it seem like a whole new galaxy with different creatures. I think the way The Mandalorian uses alien species from all over the Star Wars saga, from Trandoshans and Zabraks to Ugnaughts and Jawas, really makes it feel connected to the Star Wars we remember whilst in the foreground telling a new and fresh Star Wars story. Speaking of which, the story and characters of this show are so fun and diverse in nature, it’s not simply the story of a hardened bounty hunter, as it so easily could have been, it takes many an interesting turn and left field choice and it’s most importantly just a whole lot of fun.

Trandoshan

Zabrak

Kuill the Ugnaught

Jawa

There is another nostalgic side to this show, and that is the many references to the spaghetti western genre. This is one of my favourite things about the show, it really does feel like a western set in the Star Wars universe, with a nameless bounty hunter riding in from town to tow or planet to planet having fun adventures and just being really cool but slightly cheesy at the same time. This is what I think Disney Star Wars should have been doing from the beginning, making different genres and styles of film or TV show within the Star Wars universe and therefore keeping people interested in it rather than battering us down with movie after movie that was just trying to be the original trilogy again.

In short, Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau have created such a great first TV outing for Star Wars and I cannot wait for the next series to come. This goose has so many teeth and I hope that this is the direction for Star Wars to come. Also yes, Baby Yoda is cute as hell.