fantastic_four

Also have to commend just how PERFECT Ahsoka looked, and how utterly PERFECT Rosario Dawson is for the part--right down to her wry smile. Favreau and Filoni are Star Wars GODS. 

Completely amazing episode. LOVED the allusion to Grogu becoming like Anakin as a reason not to train him. So we're left with Din now quested to find DIFFERENT Jedi. Are there any Jedi left that we currently know of at this point besides Luke and Leia? I haven't seen Rebels or Resistance yet, but I assume those series may have introduced some Jedi characters that could be alive during this time. But now that we have Ahsoka's judgement that he doesn't just need training as a Jedi but also someone to actively teach him not to succumb to the Dark Side...who do we already know in canon PERFECTLY suited for that role? Someone who either already has a Jedi training academy or is about to start one, as well as someone who has already gone through this in resisting his own attachments and who also helped Anakin return to the Jedi? But how could they ever pull that off? Re-cast Mark Hamill with a younger actor?

My kids watch Disney Plus a ton, but what I watch the most is Clone Wars. I didn't see them when they came out and I'm watching them all in order and am currently in season 4. Planning to watch Rebels after that, still never seen any episodes of it.

If he's not involved my expectations immediately plummet. I can only assume these new series will suffer from the same problem we've had since Disney bought Lucasfilm that if whatever creators they assign to any given show do a good job then great, but if they don't there's no oversight since Kathleen Kennedy has proven she can't do that job. I'm hoping Iger has directed Feige to double-check behind her, but I've heard no specific indication he's doing that.

Or the beginning of a new one. Ahsoka could be a part of Luke's Jedi training academy, and baby Yoda could be their first student. Although he ages so slowly that I assume he's still a kid by the time Episode 9 occurs. That's not near the top of my guesses as to what WILL happen, but it certainly could.

There doesn't have to be a reason for it. She had only been a part of Star Wars since 2008, and the screenwriters of the films may just not have been familiar enough with her to include her. Having said that Ahsoka's voice is one of those Rey hears at the end of Rise of Skywalker, so she's presumably dead by then. So she must die at some point between the Mandalorian and that film. But at the time of the Mandalorian Ben Solo (Kylo Ren) is either not born yet or just a little kid, so there are decades of time for her to meet whatever her fate may have been. That's pretty open for any writer to tackle as far as I know. I doubt they kill her anytime soon. Clone Wars has aged so well that Ahsoka's popularity has grown tremendously as time has gone on. They're far more likely to milk that popularity than suddenly end the chance to leverage it.

Why?

So what sort of army is Moff Gideon building? Genetically engineered Force-sensitive troopers? When I saw those bodies in the tanks I thought they might be Palpatine clones, but those black trooper outfits at the end suggest otherwise.

I was thinking the exact same thing this morning while watching the new SW Lego Holiday Special with my son. Individually I enjoyed both of the last two films, but as a whole the inconsistency is frustrating. Pablo Hidalgo is the guy I was hoping would keep everything straight, but for whatever reason he wasn't able to. No idea if he objected but Kennedy overruled him or he let it all happen, but either way I do place at least some of the blame on him. I've heard he OK'ed the screenplay decisions in the final two films, but who knows if he just said that to cover for his boss overruling any objections he had privately. Or if he never did OK anything and has been misrepresented in the media.

Every time I think about Kathleen Kennedy letting Rian Johnson ret-con JJ Abrams' ideas, and then letting Abrams ret-con Rian's ideas into something else entirely...I get really, really sad. Time to pick somebody, Iger, and the time is NOW before any more creators are allowed to muck up the lore consistency of the Star Wars universe. Kenobi doesn't even start shooting until next year, so plenty of time to give it to Filoni before Kenobi demolishes anything! On another note I heard Kevin Smith point out that Carl Weathers returns to direct tomorrow's episode, but then next week's episode is directed by Dave Filoni. Filoni created Ahsoka, so odds are good that we don't see Ahsoka until next week when Filoni is directing meaning that tomorrow's episode is probably a side quest on the way to find Ahsoka. No word yet on who directs any of the last three episodes after Filoni's.

That's not what they're doing. Netflix aggregates multiple content creators, but Disney Plus only shows stuff they own. They will never be like Netflix, and hopefully they realize that and continue to keep the price significantly lower. That won't kill Netflix, but it would allow them to charge more. If they try to charge as much as Netflix...well...that'll have a level of success somewhere north of where Disney Plus numbers are now with a significant bump, but they won't come CLOSE to matching the viewer numbers of a provider-agnostic service like Netflix.

Will we finally find out the back story of Yoda's species once Din finds Ahsoka? And since she's no longer a Jedi will she think the child should be taken to Luke? That's problematic since Luke should still be pretty young at the point in time the Mandalorian is taking place, so I'm guessing they avoid that. Or maybe not. Not exactly sure what Luke is doing at this time, but I'm guessing he's still training Leia.

Lucas likes Filoni because he's got the best sense for Star Wars besides himself. Feige is busy enough with Marvel, but I'd love it if Feige had some limited collaboration with whoever curates Star Wars from here on out to make sure they're doing it well. Filoni proved himself on Clone Wars, and he's doing it again on the Mandalorian...put him in charge of Star Wars already!

I'd definitely call the Falcon and AT-AT "iconic"--if by that you mean the most popular--but definitely not the barge. It's just too niche for having only appeared in one scene, plus it's too big and rules out too many people due to that space requirement. The Razor Crest is already far more popular than the barge could ever be for being a central part of most episodes of the Mandalorian. I skipped it though. I almost pulled the trigger figuring I'd display it, let the kids play with it for a year or so, and then eventually sell it at a profit, but meh, just didn't feel like taking up that much space for a figure scale I don't even collect anymore. Right now my man cave is about 12" by 16"...I'm hoping our next house will have a sizable basement that I can use for a lot more storage plus a rec room.

The Razor Crest Haslab project backing period ends tonight. It's up over 25,000 backers! I was guessing 15K to 20K when they announced it, so I'm pretty surprised. It really speaks to how hot the Mandalorian is right now. And that's well-deserved; it has the best Star Wars stories since Disney bought the franchise from Lucas.

Liked this episode more than the first. Where was Dave Filoni at in the episode?

Some guy's consciousness melding with the Sarlacc and talking to Boba sounds quite dumb. How were those things supposed to keep victims alive for a thousand years, i.e. beyond the natural lifespan of most species?

Well that is all kinds of awesome. It's almost certainly who we think it is given that he fell into that Sarlacc pit on that same planet a few years before the show is taking place.

Awesome, thanks for the pic and info! FYI I asked someone on the Fwoosh what scale they thought the Kenner Falcon was and got an interestingly detailed answer about how the Falcon's scale in the movies as shown from the exterior and interior don't match up at all, and that makes establishing the scale of any model of it difficult to pin down: Well...this is getting into a weird territory because the Falcon can't really be made to scale as it isn't even in scale to itself. There was an amazing website that I believe is now gone called Ship Of Riddles ( this is a link to it in the web archive site ), but Robert Brown was EXHAUSTIVE as he determined the measurements of the internal sets and reasoned how they related to each other. (The cargo bay set where Luke trains with the remote was separate from the cockpit set, as well as the exterior set used in docking bay 94/the Death Star hangar. Also, the exterior set used on ESB shows how small that was when you see Han fixing it on Hoth while Chewie is crammed inside the cockpit.) Brown did his best to show how it could possibly fit inside the dimensions of the model used in the movies, but the bottom line was it couldn't really work. The cutaway posters, model kits, and incredible cross section books made attempts and even fudged things to make it work, but the set just wouldn't fit properly in that ship. So scale is really difficult to nail down. To answer your question though, I think a true 1:18 scale Falcon would need to be closer to 4 or even 5 feet long? Even on the TLC/Galaxy's Edge toy (called the BMF in 2008, which may help your googling as well), the cockpit pod is oversized compared to the rest of the ship, but not as badly as the old Kenner toy. it's still an incredible display piece and works with the figures really well. I realize you didn't ask for such a detailed nerding out, and believe it or not I am truncating a lot here, but hopefully that answers your question.

Hey Buzz, have you ever seen a comparison between the original 1979 Kenner Falcon and this Galaxy's Edge Falcon? I had the Kenner and just went looking for how much better this one is but couldn't find any comparisons. Just looked up that the Kenner originally cost $30, so if this one is $400 I assume it's far better even accounting for inflation.

I have seen those descriptors about inventory status on the Target web site be inconsistent, so I wouldn't take this as an absolute answer--but usually when I see stores say "Not sold at this store" (is that the phrasing you meant, or was it phrased in the way you wrote it above?) it only means they've never had it arrive in the store yet. When the GI Joe Baroness came out a few months ago all of my local stores were showing that message until they got one in, and then after they sold those it flipped to "out of stock." So "Not sold at this store" just means they've never had it, but that doesn't necessarily mean they will never get it. The Galaxy's Edge Falcon shows as "Not sold at this store" for every store in my region but one. I'm guessing that one had someone who bought it online and had it shipped to the store for pickup there. This seems like the kind of product they probably only sell online since it's so expensive.

Something to note about Target exclusives is that over the past few years and up through the recent GI Joe: Cobra Island releases stores typically got about 6 total figures each. There are a bit under 2000 Targets in America, meaning the total run just in stores was about 12,000, plus more online via the site, plus more internationally. Not really that big a run, and by my math the typical Marvel Legends wave has about 30K to 40K units produced, so the Target exclusives have been significantly lower runs than most figures. But that seems to have changed this summer. The Target exclusive Storm/Thunderbird 2-pack is showing up in stores in DROVES, about 12 to 20 per store. Most of my local stores have more than 10, and one has 20. They're also stocking the about-to-hit-the-shelves Marvel Legends Venompool wave of figures differently by buying boxes of 8 containing one figure instead of all 8 different figures from the wave in one box, so stores should be swimming in Venom figures starting in November. It's possible that these Star Wars Target exclusives may also be available in significantly larger numbers as well. If this does end up being a trend then we should also expect many of these to hit clearance. At which point I assume they eventually throttle back on the orders and we're back to having trouble buying stuff again. But hopefully for a while these figures will be easier to get.

Sometimes the scanning and printing tech that Hasbro uses results in a face that's relatively accurate to the actor, but when simplified and compressed just looks strange. The most extreme example I've seen is Tom Hiddleston as Loki as shown below. When you look closely at the print it does look amazingly accurate, yet shrunk down to a 6" figure his features look quite bizarre. You can absolutely find pictures of Pedro Pascal looking very similar to these sculpts, but their version exaggerates the idiosyncrasies of his face quite a lot. The second pic below shows the one scene where IG-11 removed his helmet to treat wounds to his head. You can absolutely see the similarities to this image in the head sculpt, but his head wasn't as wide as the sculpt makes him look.

Managed to snag a Walmart exclusive Clone Wars Ahsoka. Great likeness to the character, love it! I also have a pre-order in, but for whatever reason Walmart is TERRIBLE at ever fulfilling pre-orders, so I expected to never get that one and used Brickseek to hunt the figure down. They're not staying in stores for more than a few hours before they're gone.

These Pedro Pascal head sculpts are rough. The 6" one below is, too. Maybe they're supposed to be the "I'm getting my head squashed by The Mountain" version of Pascal.