Star Wars has had a lot of moments where it has been changed forever. The debut of a new major movie addition to the Skywalker Saga always did that. The rebooting of continuity at large ahead of those movies did that, too.
As Star Wars has grown and expanded across books, comics, films, TV shows, and games over those years, each new addition has a chance to fundamentally impact everything we know about what Star Wars is at that point. But there is perhaps no moment Star Wars changed forever more potent in the modern history that on this day five years ago , November 12, 2019: the day the first live-action Star Wars TV show, The Mandalorian , began. The Mandalorian didn’t just change Star Wars for a lot of the reasons we might recognize it for these five years later.
At the time, everyone knew the debut of that diminutive, big-eared green creature at the end of the episode was going to be huge , but no one could predict the thrall the Child, aka Baby Yoda, also aka Grogu, eventually, would come to have on mainstream pop culture as a fully armed and operational merchandising behemoth. It didn’t just prove that Star Wars live-action material could work on the small screen, kickstarting a whole streaming age for the galaxy far, far away. Revisiting the very first episode of the series these five, wild years later, one thing that’s abundantly clear that The Mandalorian thrived on when it debuted is perhaps now the very thing it struggles with most: the sheer potential of the.