This article originally appeared in our weekly newsletter. Subscribe by signing up for a free loyalty account here.
Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu follows a freelance bounty hunter and his adorable green pal in an imaginative galaxy far, far away. However, anyone versed in Japanese manga will find a dynamic that hits close to home.
The concept of a wandering assassin and his innocent young sidekick bears a close resemblance to Lone Wolf and Cub, the sprawling comic book series that birthed a six-movie franchise back in the 1970s, years before George Lucas and his space opera took flight.
The influence of Lone Wolf and Cub on The Mandalorian hasn’t been a secret. “I wanted it to be not so much influenced by Star Wars as what inspired Star Wars,” director Jon Favreau said on CBS News earlier this month. “It was influenced in no small way by Lone Wolf and Cub, which was a Japanese samurai serial…It was about finding a path where a character is not just navigating a galaxy but all of the moral decisions and choices that have to be made. Even though we love the magic of Star Wars, it’s about character growth.”
Nearly 50 years ago, Lucas conceived of the first Star Wars entry in part as homage to Saturday matinee serials of his youth (which is why the initial installment started with “Episode IV”). However, his movie knowledge went much deeper than nostalgia. Lucas, who was part of the so-called “Movie Brat” generation alongside the likes of Frances Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg, found the roots of his filmmaking identity in the international films making the rounds in the burgeoning art house circuit. These included both Akira Kurosawa’s samurai movies and Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns.
Decades later, Quentin Tarantino’s two-part Kill Bill would explore the way the synthesis of these two genres — swordplay and gunslingers — would set the stage for the modern Hollywood blockbuster. Lucas found this synergy through the lens of sci-fi fantasy, which recontextualized these milieus in a fresh context that expanded their appeal.
The first Star Wars owes a debt to Kurosawa’s 1958 medieval war epic The Hidden Fortress. That movie’s sprawling plot largely unfolds from the perspective of two lowly outcasts who play minor roles in the greater stakes of the story, much like the droids C-3PO and R2-D2 in Episode IV. In the sequel, The Empire Strikes Back, Lucas introduced a silent bounty hunter who tracks down Han Solo named Boba Fett, a calculated freelancer indebted to Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name in the Leone-directed The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly trilogy. And Boba Fett, as anyone equipped with basic Star Wars lore knows, belongs to a band of spiritual warriors known as the Mandalorians.
Does knowing these reference points enhance the Star Wars viewing experience? Maybe. Perhaps the more crucial question is the inverse: How does familiarity with the Star Wars franchise impact new viewers’ experiences with these movies? The fear is that audiences reared on fast-paced action and cutting-edge CGI may not appreciate the strengths of their older antecedents.
Yet even Lucas didn’t appreciate Kurosawa and his ilk from the outset. “I didn’t really experience foreign films until I found my way into film school,” Lucas said in a Criterion Collection interview for the DVD release of Hidden Fortress. “I was completely hooked.” Lucas was consuming a grand storytelling tradition while imagining how he might add to it. Nearly half a century later, Star Wars has followed a winding path that often feels most indebted to its own franchise history. Mandalorian and Grogu brings it back to its roots — and decades of cinema worth revisiting time and again.
Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu is now playing in IMAX at the Southampton Playhouse.