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Jon Favreau: The Mandalorian will be Star Wars meets Mad Max

Executive producer loves the "darker, freakier side of Star Wars."

Gael Cooper
CNET editor Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, a journalist and pop-culture junkie, is co-author of "Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? The Lost Toys, Tastes and Trends of the '70s and '80s," as well as "The Totally Sweet '90s." She's been a journalist since 1989, working at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Twin Cities Sidewalk, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and NBC News Digital. She's Gen X in birthdate, word and deed. If Marathon candy bars ever come back, she'll be first in line.
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  • Co-author of two Gen X pop-culture encyclopedia for Penguin Books. Won "Headline Writer of the Year"​ award for 2017, 2014 and 2013 from the American Copy Editors Society. Won first place in headline writing from the 2013 Society for Features Journalism.
Gael Cooper
2 min read
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The Mandalorian premieres on Disney Plus in November.

Lucasfilm

Star Wars fans, get ready for a novel twist on the famed universe. Ahead of this weekend's Disney D23 Expo, filmmaker Jon Favreau said his upcoming Disney Plus series, The Mandalorian, will draw on some of the wilder aspects of sci-fi worlds.

"I'm trying to evoke the aesthetics of not just the original trilogy but the first film," Favreau told The Hollywood Reporter. "Not just the first film, but the first act of the first film. What was it like on Tatooine? What was going on in that cantina? That has fascinated me since I was a child, and I love the idea of the darker, freakier side of Star Wars, the Mad Max aspect of Star Wars."

Favreau is the show's executive producer and is currently writing the second season of the series. He's so dedicated to his vision, Favreau says, that he "wrote four of the episodes before I even had a deal, because I wanted to do this but only if they wanted to do the version that I wanted to do."

Favreau says Disney Plus fits the kind of story he wants to tell with The Mandalorian.

"There's an opportunity to tell a story that's bigger than television, but you don't have the same expectations that a big holiday release has, which to me isn't that type of Star Wars that comes out of me," he said. "The type of Star Wars that I'm inspired to tell is a smaller thing with new characters."

Pedro Pascal, best known for playing Oberyn Martell in Game of Thrones, will play the main character, a lone Mandalorian gunfighter operating in the outer reaches of the galaxy. The show will debut when Disney Plus launches on Nov. 12.

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Originally published Aug. 21, 9:11 a.m. PT.