Disney Plus has us all Smiling These Days, but can it Take one Show to Save a Franchise?

By: Lorenzo R Martinez

The Magic is here, in every way imaginable to us. Credit: http://www.businessinsider.com

It has been a long time coming but Disney Plus is finally here.  Although it has launched without the new Marvel shows they were raving about all year, Disney Plus still has amazing content. 

Like every one of us growing up, we have had dozens of Disney movies that had a special bond and connection to our hearts, and that is where the magic of Disney Plus takes over. We are able to go back to our magical moment and relive it over and over again from movies like “Cinderella,” “Toy Story,” and shows such as “The Simpsons” and “Mickey Mouse.” 

However, the most anticipated show many have been looking forward to as it launched had to be “The Mandalorian.”  

The recent efforts of the Disney/Lucasfilm behemoth to free the Star Wars universe from the shackles of its own story have been met with mixed results, and that is just putting it mildly. Standalone films “Rogue One” and “Solo” billed themselves as “A Star Wars Story” in an effort to break out of the trilogy-of-trilogies while retaining the essence of the franchise, whatever that might mean. 

Both features, however, failed to mesmerize the true Star Wars fans. The spinoffs burden with nearness to the earlier films’ perspective asserting all the ways in which these expansions connect to or, even worse, explain the magic of George Lucas’s creation weighed them down and held them back from full independence.

“The Mandalorian,” an addition to the canon and the marquee release for the emerging Disney Plus streaming platform, largely evades this craziness of the current films that believe it or not have flopped. 

Besides the great episodes of the Clone Wars series, this represents the first successful attempt to reconcile the distance between being an addition of a popular knowledgeable property and being its own work. The writer, Jon Favreau sets his latest effort apart by assuming the cinematic language of the classic western, a genre that looks and feels sufficiently different from what has come before.

The Mandalorian and baby Yoda are magical together. Credit: CBR.com

Not to mention that, Baby Yoda has taken the internet by storm. The second I saw baby Yoda, I knew he was going to be a sensation and I’m totally in love with the design. 

All of the episodes that are out have some incredibly cute moments, like the Mando picking up the child by the scruff of his cloak and a shot of the Razor Crest’s dashboard through the baby’s fuzz. 

Baby Yoda is here to stay, and Pedro Pascal sells the budding partnership masterfully. He conveys a perfect balance between irritable and tough, more tired and prickly than hard-boiled. 

The Mandalorian is absolutely a great show and it only keeps getting better. With that said, I hope the magic of Disney continues to mesmerize audiences like myself and many other newcomers to the brand that rules the world.