Six years ago today, Lucasfilm revealed our very first look at The Mandalorian. How time flies! So much has happened in those last six years, and how little did we know that the series would go on to spur a boom-and-bust Star Wars TV show endurance run over the last half-decade that has given us giddy highs and dizzying lows. How little did we know that this image basically told us nothing about what the show was really going to be about! But after fellow writer and friend of the site Jordan Maison reminded me about this peculiar Star Wars anniversary on social media today, I could only remember one thing about it.
It wasn’t the nerdy joy about, oh my, is that an Amban phase-pulse rifle on his back (it was, and perhaps a sign of things to come with the show’s eventual Easter egg and cameo obsession). It wasn’t even wondering why this Mandalorian armor we were seeing looked so weirdly low key and scruffy (nobody’s perfect, as we’d come to learn about the man we’d eventually know as Din Djarin).
It was that I had to stare at this image from that fateful October day for weeks, and months, figuring out ways to re-use it over and over on this very website.
This is, of course, a very inside-baseball complaint to have. A Star Wars fan just got to look at the first ever look at the first ever live-action Star Wars TV show and go ‘whoa, cool!’ and move on with their lives. But reader, Lucasfilm would not release another official look at The Mandalorian for another six months, when the first footage from the series debuted at 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 had to write about The Mandalorian quite a lot. And when all you have to do that with is a single image of a character that you know absolutely nothing about, that starts to drive you insane. We tend to have a policy at io9 of trying not using the same image over and over on our stories, so we would try anything we could to mix it up: a super 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 when all you have is one press image from the series, and six months is practically an eternity in the world of entertainment journalism.
The reason that this incredibly silly detail is what comes to my mind immediately about this image of The Mandalorian, rather than the long, strange six years we’ve had in the galaxy far, far away since then, is because this is not a particularly unique problem to the show. In my 10 years writing as a pop culture critic, I’ve experienced this particularly inane issue over and over. There was a time when Rogue One was coming out that, before any trailers, there was only one official image of Jyn and the crew in the Yavin IV base that we could use—but at least that had multiple characters you could focus on for variety’s sake. We’re going through it right now again with James Gunn’s Superman movie, with the singular shot of David Corenswet suiting up as the Man of Tomorrow all we have to illustrate any story about the film until something, anything else comes out.
The arcane world of press images will always create situations like this, especially in an entertainment industry that loves to trickle out material to drip feed fans and control the flow of hype. I don’t know why The Mandalorian‘s first image is the one that sticks with me the most of them all, but as we prepare ourselves for a long, long wait to see the series’ seemingly final evolution in The Mandalorian & Grogu movie next year—which itself currently has just a single released image to its name, in the form of concept art—it’s a funny thing to look back on all these years later. At least now, six years later, we have enough images of the Mandalorian and Grogu to last us a good while yet.
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