'The Mandalorian' Has Finally Done The One Thing 'Star Wars' Has Been Teasing Since The Beginning Of 'A New Hope'

Star Wars has long been a melting pot showcasing different influences that came from stories of various genres. The fan favorite animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars, for example, had detective stories and even a somewhat left field Kaiju story. Even going back to the very first film in 1977, it is evident that there are western and samurai influences. This Inverse article has pointed out the similarities between the genres, particularly between the lone samurai and the lone cowboy archetypes. The article also goes into how last week's episode of The Mandalorian, titled "Chapter 13: The Jedi," has come full circle with the influences that have been teased, so to speak, since A New Hope.

The aforementioned first film (in release order, anyway) shares parallels with Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress. In an interview from 2001, George Lucas spoke a bit about the parallels:

"I decided that would be a nice way to tell the Star Wars story, which was to take the two lowest characters, as Kurosawa did, and tell the story from their point of view, which in the Star Wars case is the two droids."

The Kurosawa influences do not stop there; the scene in the Mos Eisely cantina when Han Solo negotiates the price of transporting Luke Skywalker, Ben Kenobi, and the droids to Alderaan is actually similar to a scene from a samurai film of his titled Yojimbo.

Following the airing of "The Jedi," people pointed out the parallels between scenes from the episodes and scenes filmed by Kurosawa. Your mileage may vary on whether or not they feel too on the nose, but the parallels are there. This episode feels very much like a samurai showdown type of story. Ahsoka is a master of her swords in this, as she takes down all of her enemies (in a manner that was controversial among some fans who are used to seeing adult Ahsoka not be as hack-and-slash in her fighting style).

We also get a parallel in the form of the mentor figure being presented with a potential apprentice to train. In A New Hope, Kenobi offered to train Luke, but of course ended up not being able to fulfill that completely in physical form. In this case, Ahsoka Tano provides a bit of information for us but refuses to train The Child, whom we now know is named Grogu. In a way, this is a subversion of what one would expect from the tropes, but the episode is still very much samurai-influenced, which was thrilling to a lot of viewers.

While Ahsoka is off the board on The Mandalorian at the moment, the absence of a master of the sword such as her does not necessarily mean that we will not see more of the samurai influence on the series. Being George Lucas' "apprentice" in a sense, it is no surprise that Dave Filoni continued the tradition of injecting the samurai tropes. In fact, the way that the Maul and Kenobi duel played out in Rebels had a samurai feel to it. So, given Filoni's involvement in the ongoing series, it would not be surprising to see more stories that are clearly samurai influenced. The parallels were there in the original film, but they were more overt in "The Jedi." The Mandalorian truly does come full circle by looking at the things that influenced Star Wars rather than just turning to Star Wars itself as a sole source of inspiration. Star Wars is often at its best when it mixes things up.

Written By Steven Shinder

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