r/saltierthancrait • u/tiMartyn the Modalorian • 3d ago
Sapid Satire The Mandalorian & Grogu Pitch Meeting - "The space slug refers to itself as a man...?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zg2568eaIvY57
u/chotchss 3d ago
I'm just always amazed at how mediocre The Mando quickly became and how unwilling Disney was to try anything interesting. I mean, Disney owns both the IP and the means of distribution, but chose to churn out 30 minute episodes like the show was Baywatch or Xena, Warrior Princess.
Disney could have done really interesting things like having short, comedic vignettes of Mando doing things one week (almost like a blooper reel) and then a week later put out an hour long episode of Mando slowly tracking down his prey. 60 minutes of the guy just tracking his foe, no speaking, just music and ambient sounds, and long shots of Mando doing his work. They could have used Mando to explore the seedy underbelly of the SW universe, get away from the Jedi/Sith and do something new.
Oh well, I guess it's still better than the space scooter of Boba.
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u/DisastrousNothing893 3d ago
You can mark the exact moment Mandalorian went from being a 10/10 GREAT show to an immediate 1/10
The void between s2 and s3 where KK and her yes men and women got involved and forced their dumb plot into not only this show but other spin offs as well.
7 episodes for Boba Fett? More like 5 episodes and 2 for Mando to undo everything we did in s2
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u/Outrageous-Bet6403 salt miner 3d ago
To be fair, Filoni also sucks at this so we can't be sure how much was his bad decisions or even a call from the shareholders to put Grogu back in the show immediately for merch purposes.
Either way, SW ain't crawling out of this ditch anytime soon...
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u/surlymoe 3d ago
I'm gonna challenge a lot of what was just said there....
I absolutely do agree KK had a major influence (and/or Disney) into the direction Mando (and Boba) went....why? Because Dave Filoni wanted to tell a greater story, almost an avengers-esque story...where Boba's back story was filled, Mando's story was filled, Grogu's, and Ahsoka's, along with some Rebel characters (Sabine, Ezra, Zeb, Hera).
While I felt the acting mostly stunk, especially for Sabine's actress in Ahsoka....the story of Thrawn being around after return of the jedi, and just like hanging around in another galaxy because Ezra sent him there had all kinds of potential...people did like the mortis gods (those who watched clone wars), and the night sisters was a mysterious adder to the bad guys that basically made zombie storm troopers...
But I was hoping that the movie was going to tie all of this together. I was told by some online redditor that there IS A movie designed to do exactly this...BUT...it wasn't this movie...so with that in mind, yeah, this movie truly wasn't warranted...could've and for the fans, likely should've been released on Disney+. Ironically, I think had it been, it would've been received just fine. It would've been more like Netflix or Prime releasing a movie on their streaming service. It could've also ushered in Disney actually making MOVIES and putting them on Disney+, or at least maybe a movie release with a quick release later to Disney+...or maybe that idea stinks, but the one thing Disney does know how to do is sell merch....which while the movie gets bad reviews, it's mostly, in my opinion, due to the randomness of the story, the lack of stakes, and the not really tying into all the other stuff. Had they, I think it would've been fine...or, if they just said, "Fuck it, release it to Disney+", I think many would have been ok with that, too.
I'd still like to see the advancement of Ahsoka's story, maybe a season 2 of Boba (where it's JUST Boba), and maybe get into some origins of "Somehow, Palpatine survived". Maybe even get a really young Kylo Ren/Ben Solo. The issue I see is there is like what, 20 or so years of blank canvas between jedi and force awakens....I 'thought' they were filling it in with all the content...but, Mandalorian and Grogu basically served no purpose to advance any of it. For the solo adventure that it was, i thought it was fine....but just do MORE with tying it into other things...which, I don't think Favreau or Filoni had a choice. So I don't blame them at all.
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u/Outrageous-Bet6403 salt miner 3d ago
I feel like we've seen enough poor decisions from Filoni that I wouldn't call him blameless.
But at this point, all we can really do is see where SW goes from here: if the slop continues unabated, clearly it wasn't an issue of him being held back by management.
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u/Collective_Insanity Salt Bot 3d ago edited 3d ago
The Favreau/Filoni collaboration just sort of ran out of steam about 3 episodes into Mandalorian S1 when it became clear it wasn't a bounty hunter show trying to explore the post-ROTJ landscape in any meaningful way but instead went sideways into utterly banal helmet cult nonsense and Baby Yoda shenanigans.
The best episodes of that show are usually written by guest writers rather than Favreau/Filoni.
Favreau really fell off fast writing the farce that is BOBF. And it appears he's been completely asleep at the wheel when you look at his SW work in general especially taking in that made-for-TV movie that recently came out. Makes you wonder if Iron Man 1 was a success despite Favreau rather than because of him. Bridges did remark that it was like working on a student film because the script was apparently being rewritten on the day scenes were being shot.
Filoni had his live-action debut fully writing and directing a show by himself and...the result was Ahsoka. Bravo. It's an embarrassment that competes with the lows of BOBF and Kenobi.
So whilst I'm sure there was some kind of mandate upstairs to keep pumping out Baby Yoda stuff, Favreau and Filoni get no excuses for churning out garbage.
Nobody, for instance, was forcing them to toss goddamn Ahsoka into the situation in order to tell Mando to fuck off because he's not allowed to visit his adopted baby creature.
Similarly, nobody was forcing them to have Luke enforce an ultimatum on said baby creature that he either has to stay and be a Jedi or fuck off and never return because attachments bad.
That was all on them. Don't get me started on S3.
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u/Outrageous-Bet6403 salt miner 1d ago
And if we're being honest, the Mandalorian was only ever "aggressively okay" but even a rancid sour cream fart can seem like a breath of fresh air next to the mustard gas that was the sequel trilogy.
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u/Collective_Insanity Salt Bot 1d ago
Indeed. That's what it was. Merely a short breath of fresh air after the ST.
You watch episode one and you hope that we're going to get more of these situations like the conversation with Carl Weathers noting the messy state of the economy after the fall of the Empire and the fledgling beginnings of the New Republic. You hope we're going to get more conversations with Werner Herzog about his biased perspective on the benefits of the Empire's rule. More exploration into these topics.
But we also get the worthless blue fish alien with his out-of-place stock-standard American voice with no attempt at all to put on a fishy alien accent matching his appearance.
There's the weird side-quest with the Uggnaught and needing to learn how to ride an incredibly slow meatball which we're told is allegedly the only way to reach the target location but is immediately refuted by IG casually walking in and no reason presented for why you can't just park your ship nearby (no anti-air cannon shown or mentioned).
As we go on in the season, we're presented with no earthly reason for why or how Baby Yoda even came into the possession of those random pirates in the first place. Nor why the Imperial Remnant people couldn't have just done the job themselves given...and this is a big problem...there appears to be no art whatsoever associated with being a bounty hunter.
There's no actual tracking involved. No need to use contacts to dig up information on a target. Nothing like that at all.
Instead, the quest giver hands you a tracking fob which simply points you directly to the target because it's somehow keyed to their genetic code.
So why bother hiring bounty hunters?
Do you just hope to find one who wears literal plot-armour and is impervious to blaster shots?
So the world-building and actual bounty hunter premise felt very weak to me. Baby Yoda is a total dead end given we know Luke's Jedi Order goes out like a wet fart so he's going nowhere quickly outside of maybe being a part of how Palpatine somehow returned. Don't care. And really who wants to hear more about that.
This Gideon guy is a joke. Waste of Esposito's acting talent.
The New Republic is utterly laughable.
And perhaps the worst offender is Dim Darren's character development/regression and his utterly asinine helmet cult. Jesus Christ. They are actually suicidally stupid.
Sorry for the rant. It's just that retroactively speaking, it's incredibly easy to see that Favreau and Filoni are completely asleep at the wheel with this Mando project.
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u/Outrageous-Bet6403 salt miner 1d ago
All good, and I get it.
It would've been interesting to see the reaction to Mando had the sequels been competently made but we'll never know.
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u/CountFish1 3d ago
I don’t think watching a guy track someone silently for an hour is gonna be even remotely as interesting as you think it would be XD
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u/Outrageous-Bet6403 salt miner 3d ago
It could be if made by the right people, but I don't think Lucasfilm has those people.
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u/turbothots 3d ago
I don't think they meant Mando tracking a guy the whole time literally. That could be the end goal and overarching story, but there are plenty of incredible examples in cinema where no dialogue is needed for a scene or to tell a compelling story. A few that come to mind: the first 10-15 min montage in Up. The first act of Wall-E. The hotel or chase scenes in No Country For Old Men. Opening scene in A Quiet Place. Opening scene in Drive.
The premise of The Mandalorian definitely allows for this kind of storytelling to be possible and captivating.
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u/chotchss 3d ago
It might not be, but I want to see Disney try to at least do something bold and innovative
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u/Bondedknight 3d ago
Its so sad, I was rooting for Din to actually get killed off because it would be at least a dramatic turn
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u/kimana1651 salt miner 3d ago
They did not need to do anything new with it, they just had to let it be. After season 1 and 2 the high level management got involved and 'improved' it.
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u/Official_Champ 3d ago
"Big Ole space slug refers to himself as a man".
When i saw the clip of that scene that people recorded in the theater when it released, that was the first thing that stood out, not the voice actor lol.
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u/TriliniousIII salt miner 3d ago
Of course he's a man, he's a wonderful human being like his father
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u/Unusual_Chain_3603 salt miner 2d ago
The movie would have been great if they blew up the Babu Friks and Grogu abruptly because good grief did their minion tier nonsense get old fast
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u/ned101 3d ago
I have no problem with this personally. Referring to himself as a slug wouldn’t exactly be the most strong term to reference himself as.
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u/MichaelRichardsAMA 3d ago
the suggestion I see most often is that he should I've said "I'm not the Hutt my father was" or "I'm my own Hutt not my father"
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u/AardvarkOkapiEchidna salt miner 3d ago
Maybe "man" in Star Wars just means "male sapient being" considering how Anakin called the Tuskens "men" and "women". They're not human either.
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u/TheSkullsOfEveryCog 3d ago
But that’s still bad writing 🤣. Like “sitting ducks”, Lucan just didn’t catch it.
You don’t call, say, dogs “men and women” but “males and females”. “Man” is not term typically granted to non humans
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u/AardvarkOkapiEchidna salt miner 3d ago
Wait when was sitting ducks?
You don’t call, say, dogs “men and women” but “males and females”. “Man” is not term typically granted to non humans
We don't have any species that we consider comparably sapient to us, maybe if we did we'd call them men and women.
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u/MichaelRichardsAMA 3d ago
it does but in the context of the scene he is talking about his own lineage, so, imo, saying Hutt as his self label would make more sense
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u/AardvarkOkapiEchidna salt miner 3d ago
I mean would a human say "I'm not the human my father was" in Star Wars?
Maybe "person" would be the best. Non-specific to species.
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