The Mandalorian and all those spin-offs

I'm obsessed with The Mandalorian right now, have you noticed? I've been watching a lot of stuff about The Mandalorian on YouTube, and I guess several of these new shows they announced are, like, Mandalorian spinoffs, and there may be a big sort of Avengers (or at least Defenders) style series eventually where the characters from multiple shows go up against Thrawn or something? I guess that could be fine if they do it well, but that seems so much more of a Marvel thing. Same people are pretty much running both of them now, though. Anyway, Favreau's done both, and I pretty much trust him and Filoni, they've done a great job so far!

(I took notes last week so all this is from what I wrote down. Some of it came straight from videos of the investor call and some of it came from other Star Wars sources. UPDATED since I first posted it early this morning regarding the Boba Fett series.)

The new Mandalorian-related shows we know of are:
Ahsoka
Rangers of the New Republic
The Book of Boba Fett (Confirmed just this morning by Jon Favreau to be a separate series. Some people had been arguing that it might actually just be a story arc as part of The Mandalorian, but no, it's not. Both it and Season 3 of Mando will be out next December. He also said that they're already filming Boba Fett and in fact they're almost done, and Mandalorian S3 will start filming as soon as that's done.)

Another note on the series above: Disney does not call them spinoffs - that is a pretty loaded word. They say that they are "set in the time-period of the Mandalorian" (or something to that effect - I didn't go double-check the exact wording).

The Ahsoka and Boba Fett shows are presumably both limited series, but Rangers of the New Republic seems more like it would be an ongoing thing. Could be Cara Dune and that guy Carson that's been in a couple of episodes this year, or it could be something completely new, we just don't know. Nor do we know what the timetable on this is, do we? Boba Fett next December, but the other ones maybe not until 2022, I guess. Unless they've started working on it already and they're just keeping it under wraps, which they have proven themselves pretty good at.

The next movie is going to be Patty Jenkins' Rogue Squadron which... do we know anything about when that's set? If they've said I can't remember. But it's pretty definitely not tied in with the Mandalorian stuff. All we really know is it's about pilots. (And then Taika Waititi is working on something, but he's gotta finish Thor 3 first. And maybe Rian Johnson is still working on something, but if so they didn't mention it at all in that investor call that all of this information came from.) I assume Rogue Squadron is a standalone. They've dropped the "A Star Wars Story" thing, haven't they? But it would probably be one of those if they were still using that name.

The other series that may be coming in 2021 is the animated The Bad Batch, basically a Clone Wars spinoff. Oh, and I think also the anime-style one, which is a series of shorts, called Visions.

Then there's the three series starring characters we know already - Obi-Wan, Lando, and Cassian Andor (that one is just called Andor and it's a Rogue One prequel). I don't think they've said a whole lot about the other two. Oh, no wait, they did say that Hayden Christiansen is going to appear in the Obi-Wan series. That's bound to be interesting.

And then there's something called The Acolyte and something called A Droid Story. The latter is supposed to have the familiar droids in it, but also a new one. The Acolyte is more of a mystery, but it's supposed to be set in the High Republic era, which is far earlier than all the rest of this - hundreds of years, maybe, if I'm remembering right.

The Lego Star Wars Holiday Special

Here's something that's not about The Mandalorian! (Still Star Wars, but hey, I gotta write about something!)

I watched the Lego Star Wars Holiday Special, and it was pretty funny. I've never seen the old one.

I don't know if younger people understand this, but in 1978 you couldn't just tape things off the TV - I think that technology was probably in its infancy then, but normal people didn't start having VCRs and cable and stuff til the 80s. Something would be on at 8:00, say, on one of the maybe five channels we had at the time -- and if you didn't watch it then you were out of luck. You might not see it again for years. In fact, did they ever repeat the Star Wars Holiday Special at all? I just heard rumors about how terrible it was, later on.

Anyway, I had the vague idea that it had something to do with Life Day and Chewie's family, but that's about all I know about the original. I just looked on Wikipedia and it actually had Harvey Korman and Bea Arthur (I had no idea, but that is so very 70s, Harvey Korman was in everything).

There is some stuff about Life Day and Chewie's family in the new one, but there's also Rey attempting to train Finn, followed by a highly unlikely plot about Rey and BB8 jumping around in time to see various jedis and their padawans. Clearly that's not based on anything in the old one, since there was nothing but the original movie to jump to, at the time. It was silly, but it's Lego Star Wars, that's what you expect. Anyway, I enjoyed it. I've actually seen it twice, because Rob expressed a desire to watch something Christmassy, and I said, "Oh, I know something!" He liked it too.

(And Wikipedia also said that in fact, no, they did NOT ever repeat the show on broadcast TV or anywhere else, for many years. I think you can get hold of it these days, now that it's nostalgia and not quite such an embarrassment.)

(And it also said that it aired in November 1978, not December, so I would have been in my dorm room in Austin, and we didn't have a TV there. You had to go downstairs to watch TV. I bet if I'd gone down there it would have been on, because Star Wars was pretty much a religion at the time I was in college - at least for the geeks - but I don't think I was even aware that the show was airing at the time.)


HOLIDAILIES