OK, that’s two in favour of the cold open. And Sade, yes, I’ve been thinking about Rebels too.
Fact of the matter is that what I’m finding here, as I review these, is that presentation is so key. Honestly, viewing these two shows through the lens of Mandalorian has been so healthy. What are Mando’s strengths? Each episode is self-contained, tight, the length it needs to be, and fucking excellent whether or not it’s focusing on the big overarching plot. And the show as a whole isn’t clustering its characters and locations into arcs, it’s letting them breathe across the show. We feel Moff Gideon’s presence across the show since his reveal. We anticipate his return and the return of the Darksaber. We anticipated the return of [redacted] since they were mentioned. We now anticipate the return of [redacted again], who I’m amazed they just mentioned. Meanwhile, we get a great episode every time, and we trust that the overarching plot will move along at a decent pace.
There needs to be a rolling, ever-present, over-arcing threat. And that isn’t the Clone Wars, because we know the outcome. And it isn’t Palpatine, because we know his outcome too. The threat and the anticipation comes from the wild card element and the presence of characters we care about who we don’t know the fate of*. And that wild card is Maul, and the main character we care for is Ahsoka.
(*Note: Knowing the ‘fate’ of a person doesn’t mean knowing whether or not they die. It means knowing how these events affect them personally and change their character.)
So that’s the mission statement: We care for Ahsoka from as early as possible, and we fear Maul from as early as possible. The metric for anything else is firstly whether or not it adds to that, and secondly, is it excellent?
I think this’ll be the most radical part of this show. That I think the Mauldalore content should begin ASAP and be spread evenly throughout. I’ve checked, and Ahsoka doesn’t appear in any of the early stuff, so we can break the ‘new character models’ rule and put the Nightsister arc way earlier.
The interesting thing about this is that so much of this can be fixed by presentation - literally me just saying ‘Here’s a list, watch these episodes in this order.’ And honestly, I genuinely believe there’ll be new value in that.
Next will be polish, the actual editing. We’ve already cut the shite episodes, but now we need to prune for the best and tighten up the most necessary ones.
Then, more presentation. Watching today’s Mando I was struck by the nice art that goes over the credits. Each episode has these too, and they’re readily available. Imagine if each outro gave you lovely art showing you a bit more about how the pie is made, to give you a few more seconds to digest what you just watched. I think there’s real value there too. I’ll also make sure the opening cards are tight, and draw you in in the right way. It should be something like:
- (Optional) Previously On (requires sound editing capabilities)
- Modern red/blue droid/helmet SW TV logo
- Star Wars: The Clone Wars logo (s7 version)
- One screen worth of three short sentences of blue intro text (like Solo)
- [take a beat]
- Episode title
- [take a beat]
- Begin episode (probably iris out, mostly)
Finally, there’s the pro polish pass on the editing. Before I acquired digital copies, I watched my DVDs on a PS4, so I don’t have a DVD reader that I can rip the raw files from. This means my audio editing can’t be sky’s the limit because the tracks aren’t separated. I’m sure SW sound effects are easy to get hold of, and I’ll buy the soundtracks if I need to, plus I don’t actually have the skill to sound edit yet (but I won’t let that stop me). But it would be nice to, let’s say, add in Mando’s theme tune’s ‘da-dungg’ at a key point for Bo-Katan, for example. This would also allow for the extension of openings to allow the opening beats to last longer (and thus invite us into the world that much more).