Six years ago today, Lucasfilm unveiled our first look The Mandalorian. How time flies! A lot has happened in those last six years, and little did we know how boom-and-bust the series would continue. star Wars The endurance of the TV show has continued during the last half decade that has given us sad highs and dizzying lows. Little did we know that this picture didn’t say anything about what the game was about indeed it will be about! But after a fellow writer and friend helped Jordan Maison remind me of this oddity star Wars It’s a day of remembrance on social media today, I was remembering one thing about it.
It wasn’t crazy excitement about, oh minethat Amban phase-pulse gun on his back (it was, and maybe a sign of things to come with the show’s final easter egg and cameo obsession). It was no wonder why this Mandalorian shield we were seeing looked so damn low (no one is perfect, as we would learn about the man we would know as Din Djarin).
It was that I had to stare at this picture from that fateful October day for weeks, months, finding ways to reuse it over and over again on this very website.
This, of course, is the appeal within baseball that you must have. A star Wars A fan recently watched the live action for the first time star Wars TV show and say ‘whoa, cool!’ and get on with their lives. But reader, Lucasfilm won’t release another official preview The Mandalorian to another six monthswhile the first video of the series starts with star Wars Celebration in 2019. And if you’re familiar with the website you’re reading right now, you can safely assume that, many times over that six-month period, we’ve had to write The Mandalorian very much indeed. And when you have to do that with one picture of a character you know nothing about, it starts to drive you crazy. We tend to have a policy at io9 of trying not to use the same image over and over in our stories, so we’ll try anything we can to mix it up: a very tight crop here, a wider one there. One that would push this mysterious Mando closer to the left of the frame, or to the right. But there are only so many times you can do that where you only have one press photo from a series, and six months is an eternity in the world of entertainment journalism.
The reason these details are so incredibly stupid is what immediately comes to my mind with this picture of The Mandalorianrather than the six long, strange years we’ve had in the galaxy far, far away since then, it’s because this isn’t a problem particularly unique to this show. In my 10 years of writing as a pop culture critic, I’ve come across this strange issue time and time again. There was a time there Rogue One it turns out that, before any trailers, there was only one official image of Jyn and crew on the Yavin IV base to use—but at least it had more characters to focus on for variety. We’re going through it right now with James Gunn Superman movie, with David Corenswet’s one-shot adaptation of The Man of Tomorrow is all we have to show any story about the movie until anything else comes out.
The arcane world of media images will always create situations like this, especially in the entertainment industry that likes to release visuals to attract fans and control the flow of hype. I do not know why The MandalorianThe first image is the one that sticks with me the most, but as we prepare for a long, long wait to see the series’ seemingly final The Mandalorian & Grogu movie next year—which currently only has one picture released to its name, in the form of concept art—it’s funny to look back on all these years later. At least now, six years later, we have enough pictures of the Mandalorian again Grogu will keep us going for a while now.
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