The Mandalorian: The Latest Space Western Series in a New Era of American Television
From the outset, Jon Favreau’s The Mandalorian (2019) pays homage to a duality of histories: the American Western genre and the rich tapestry of the Star Wars franchise. Set in the years following the fall of the Empire and before the emergence of the First Order, the show follows the travails of The Mandalorian (Pedro Pascal), a lone gunslinger operating in the outer reaches of the galaxy. The show refers explicitly to a number of classic Western films released between the 1930s and 1960s, when the genre’s popularity was at its peak in Hollywood, and uses the nostalgia, memory, and identity of these iconic Westerns as a vehicle for delivering the show’s themes. Each episode runs like a condensed, classic Western, whereby the storytelling is set in chapters and features ‘Mando’ embarking upon a quest, encountering an array of characters along the way, facing feats of galactic danger, all […]