The Art of Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu harnesses 50 years of the franchise

Review by C.J. Bunce

Building on the artwork and designs his team created for The Mandalorian series, director Jon Favreau and production designer Doug Chiang brought even more essential elements of Star Wars together for this summer’s blockbuster hit The Mandalorian and Grogu (reviewed here at borg). In the best deep dive yet into a Star Wars film in the dozen volumes of Abrams Books’ series of Star Wars art books, fans will get to learn about all those ties to Star Wars’ past, including George Lucas ideas and even Ralph McQuarrie concepts dusted off and built upon. It’s all inside The Art of Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu, available for pre-order now here at Amazon, arriving in bookshops next week. Not only filled completely with beautiful concept artwork, author Phil Szostak delivers one of the best discussions yet of creating costumes, props, vehicles, and environments that look “Star Wars-y” for a Star Wars film. Favreau, Chiang, Dave Filoni, Andrew L. Jones, concept design supervisor Christian Alzmann, and more discuss all their influences, ranging from unused Ralph McQuarrie sketches for the original Star Wars to Kenner toys barely or never seen on screen before.

So many fantastic elements are in this movie, and this book digs into them all, exactly like any fan would hope for. Like the opening on the snow planet that evokes Hoth from The Empire Strikes Back while pulling in the updated AT-ATs from the animated series Star Wars Rebels. Like the one-shot that finally showed the interior of the AT-AT. And speaking of Rebels, the book looks at the process of bringing back that series’ co-star Zeb for his second live-action Star Wars appearance. Readers will learn how director Jon Favreau brought the classic Kenner toy mini-rig into Star Wars canon for the first time.

New to Star Wars but not to Favreau projects, costume designer Mary Zophres discusses updating the Snowtroopers and taking troopers from both the original trilogy and Rogue One to introduce more very Star Wars-looking troopers for this film. Set decorator Amanda Serino discusses updating Adelphi Base from the series for the big screen. All those ships! The Razor Crest returns as Mando’s ship of choice, and the landspeeders from Luke’s era are further updated like audiences saw Han Solo driving in Solo: A Star Wars Story. Visual effects production supervisor John Knoll discusses filming a silver ship in space and what it should look like.

And there’s more. Readers will see close-ups of the sabacc “kill deck” and the Lucasfilm crew members who made a brief appearance on the cards. Mary Zophres discusses building thousands of costumes, while being able to bring in costumes from the UK from Rogue One and Solo. The Mandalorian and Grogu was the first Star Wars movie filmed entirely in the U.S. Zophres likened the experience to being able to tap Western Costume Company, the vintage costume supply shop once used by Hollywood for decades. You’ll learn how Shakari’s Second Moon was based on 1930s Chicago and readers get to see that influence, along with the close-up imagery of food… including a Spam sandwich? At the same time, doesn’t this rainy, neon-lit cityscape resemble Earth of Blade Runner?

Doug Chiang discusses the new hero Rotta the Hutt, and how he was adapted to live-action, from Christian Alzmann’s baby Hutt design to Rotta’s final physically-fit onscreen look. Audiences finally got to watch a Hutt move quickly and Chiang discusses all the nuances of making it happen along with members of his team. The biggest surprise of the third act was Favreau delivering a full-scale version of the Millennium Falcon’s original Dejarik holochess game, a full-sized combat with each beast fleshed out, larger than life. Readers can marvel at images of each of those once-holographic monsters all in this book. Rounding out the Chicago influence is the chase sequence after that combat bursts from the arena, which was an homage to The Blues Brothers.

Chiang discusses taking the bounty hunter Embo from the animated series The Clone Wars to become a surprise nemesis for Mando in the movie. He would be an entirely digital character. On the planet Nal Hutta, Star Wars fans had an even greater nostalgia pull, as Grogu got to live on a swampy world not unlike Yoda’s Dagobah. That giant dragonsnake, who the Hutt twins force Mando to face, is intended to be the same type of creature seen briefly in Yoda’s swamp. Then there’s the Amanaman gang, based on a background character from Jabba’s palace in Return of the Jedi. This was another Favreau addition no doubt sparked by the strange Kenner action figure. And another toy reference is the STAP Droid vehicle–the early toy that heralded Kenner back into Star Wars for The Phantom Menace. Has any Star Wars project yet incorporated more Easter eggs from the past and tied together more series, films, books, and comics?

Of course the book is filled with many gorgeous concept paintings of Mando and Grogu. You can’t have too many images of Grogu wandering the swamp planet. The best image is probably Mando carrying Grogu and four Anzellans to safety following Sigourney Weaver’s Colonel Ward and her team of fighters’ destruction of the Hutt twins’ giant lair. And an image of an exhausted Grogu sleeping on Mando’s lap flying off at the end of it all just can’t be topped. The love for Star Wars shared by the creators of the film, and the abundance of nostalgic throwbacks in this volume really makes each new book in the series even better than the last.