Favreau discussed the tone of the show.
“It’s like after the Roman Empire falls, or when you don’t have a centralized shogun in Japan — and, of course, the Old West, when there wasn’t any government in the areas that had not yet been settled,” says showrunner Jon Favreau (The Lion King), who spearheads the series along with longtime Star Wars animated-series producer Dave Filoni. “Those are also cinematic tropes in films that originally inspired George Lucas to make Star Wars.”
Indeed, The Mandalorian’s clearest inspiration is the first act of A New Hope, which played like a Western set in space: exotic creatures, smugglers, soldiers, and bounty hunters leading rough lives in an overlooked outlaw territory. (Conversely, the show is perhaps the furthest from the Star Wars prequels and the aristocratic poshness of their Jedi council meetings on Coruscant.) Expect The Mandalorian to travel from system to system in a very “boots on the ground” tale without any major legacy characters…at least, not in the first season.
“I’ve always been curious what the other people in the cantina are up to,” Favreau says. “We’re digging really deep in the toy chest and pulling out the action figures that people were always curious about and were not quite in the center frame, but have a lot of potential.”
Or as Filoni puts it: “These are the [action figures] you got. Your older brothers have had ‘good’ ones. Somehow you got Boba Fett. And if you have Boba Fett, you could always tell a good story.”
