Five years ago, Disney decided to leap into the Wild West of streaming. Gone are the days of Netflix collaborations and the Disney vault. From November 12, 2019 onward, the official home for all things Mickey became Disney+.
But offering Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century and The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes to viewers can only take you so far: the service needed innovative original programming to keep subscribers hooked. Some new shows, like High School Musical: The Musical: The Series and Forky Asks a Question, took hit movies and turned them into lighthearted series. Others, like The Imagineering Story, allowed for a look behind Disney’s curtain.
But one show was undoubtedly the service’s biggest draw. The Mandalorian not only breathed new life into a classic franchise, but managed to pull off a genuine surprise in a world full of leaks and spoilers.
The Mandalorian was carefully presented as an episodic series following a Mandalorian, which is kind of like Boba Fett, as he traversed the galaxy. Initial reviews revealed that it traded the space opera tone of the movies for a Western vibe, and that it was set amid the chaos of the New Republic trying to establish itself after the Empire’s collapse.
That’s about all fans knew as they watched the unnamed Mandalorian seek out an “asset,” something important to what was left of the Empire. Mando is told little, and he doesn’t question his assignment. It all leads up to the big reveal that the asset isn’t a familiar face or a superweapon; it’s a little baby. A baby Yoda, to be exact.
This reveal was exciting because there was nary a peep of it before the show’s release. According to Vanity Fair, Mandalorian co-showrunner Jon Favreau said he wanted to hold off on making Baby Yoda merchandise in case it leaked, meaning the plushies and t-shirts didn’t hit stores until 2020; a big sacrifice for Disney considering The Mandalorian debuted during the holiday season.
But boy, was it worth it. This year, two of the biggest reveals in fellow Disney+ series Agatha All Along were spoiled when a British toy company posted photos of Funko pops weeks before the show told us who the characters really were. It’s a different franchise at a different time, but the buzz surrounding Baby Yoda was massive, in part because it felt like the character came out of nowhere, while the big Agatha moments just confirmed what we already knew. Such spoilers are routine now, and they’ve sucked the life from shows.
In the years to come, Star Wars would deliver more big twists, including the return of Boba Fett and Luke Skywalker, the live-action debut of Ahsoka Tano, and even a glimpse of a young Princess Leia. But none of these come close to the Baby Yoda reveal because, for the first and really only time since Disney+ launched, there was nothing to speculate about. The Mandalorian was a series about a character we’d never met in a setting we’d never seen.
The Mandalorian would help keep Star Wars afloat despite the struggles of the sequel trilogy, it would anchor a broader “Mando-verse” that brought in Disney+ subscribers, and it would help make Baby Yoda such a pop culture phenomenon that he’s now the unofficial mascot of Star Wars’ next chapter. But for one glorious moment, it also managed to truly shock Star Wars fans, and the franchise has been searching for a similar high ever since.
