A new Star Wars movie—the first in six years—hits theaters in a month. There’s a lot riding on it, for a lot of reasons, but it also feels like there’s a lot to be concerned about. It doesn’t feel like there’s a new Star Wars movie coming out that soon. What we have seen hasn’t entirely been inspiring, with three main trailers that, by and large, all cover similar bits of the movie to varying degrees of detail. There’s the challenge of bringing what has been, up to this point, a streaming TV show to the big screen—and so far the people behind it have yet to really make a convincing argument as to why this had to be a movie in the first place.
But at the moment, I am worried about a baby hutt.
Recently, my esteemed colleague Germain Lussier was invited to the set of The Mandalorian and Grogu, and director Jon Favreau’s studio, to poke around and see the opening sequence of the film (you can read his thoughts here!). Afterwards, he sent me the image that would begin to wrack my mind for the next week, almost without a second thought: a picture of a maquette of a live-action rendition of Rotta the Hutt, in his baby form.
Sure, we already knew Rotta—son of Jabba, voiced by The Bear‘s Jeremy Allen White, and whose last major role was in the last time Lucasfilm tried to make a movie out of a TV show, the 2008 theatrical debut of The Clone Wars—was going to be in the movie. But that’s in his grown-up, distressingly yoked form. But as a huttlet? And combined with the knowledge that Rotta’s role, if White’s positioning in the film’s credits is anything to go by, could be bigger than first anticipated?
Now, we don’t know how much a baby Rotta could appear in The Mandalorian and Grogu or, hell, if he could appear at all—maybe the maquette was just made as a fun visual exercise, and Favreau kept it around, and it’s not like every little thing in his workshop was made for the film (we even saw the remnants of Skeleton Crew‘s Neel prosthetics, and we can probably mark him safe from appearing here). But just looking at The Mandalorian‘s track record of indulgences, some kind of callback to Rotta’s previous theatrical appearance seems like child’s play. Or huttlet’s play, in this case.
No matter how big or small the moment, what is exactly served in The Mandalorian and Grogu by going back to this time of Rotta’s life? For a film that is, purportedly, trying to start from step one all over again as a cinematic reintroduction for Star Wars, what weight is there in throwing audiences back to The Clone Wars, other than to call back to familiarity? Could we even see Anakin and Ahsoka in some form, given their importance to Rotta’s rescue—but why would we need to, other than so the audience that knows can point and go, “It’s just like back in Clone Wars!”
Live-action Star Wars media from the past few years has had this bizarre fascination with going beyond just pulling characters from animated works into the live-action space but lifting moments, too, like Obi-Wan Kenobi‘s bizarre desire to recreate a pivotal moment from Anakin and Ahsoka’s Rebels duel, despite coming chronologically earlier. The result? It had a fraction of the weight that the moment from Rebels did and felt weird to anyone who recognized it as a nod to it: an echo within an echo, Star Wars‘ obsession with the familiar at its most hollow. And in this case, what The Mandalorian and Grogu would be calling back to is a few pretty low-end episodes of Clone Wars that got mushed together and put in theaters, rather than any of the incredible work the series would go on to do.
It’s clear from what we have been shown that The Mandalorian and Grogu is playing its sabacc cards close to its chest. But if what it’s trying to hide is the worst kind of indulgence of Star Wars‘ streaming era—and a flashback to anything from the Clone Wars is that kind of indulgence—just making its way to the big screen, then it would just seem like Lucasfilm has learned very little from its time away from theaters. And is that worth the wait?
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