The Mandalorian: Chapter 1- The Mandalorian

“Is it true that you guys never take off your helmets?"

It's here, at last. Disney Plus has reached the UK which, aside from a bunch of Star Wars films I need to belatedly blog, means the arrival of a certain acclaimed series, the title of which my inner voice always renders in the tune of The Pixies' "My Veloria(n)". And yes, you're welcome to that earworm.

I recall surprisingly little of Mandalorians. I know Boba Fett well from the original trilogy, and I recall that, at some point in the prequels (which I'll be blogging soon), he gets retconned as a clone with a Kiwi accent. That's it. I'm a Star Wars fan, but not an uber-hardcore one.

But I'm enough of a fan to notice all the many Easter Eggs, from the wipes between scenes taken from Akira Kurosawa via George Lucas to Salacious Crumb in a cage via all the many familiar alien races and tech- and an environment that, despite the preponderance of CGI,  just feels like Star Wars- starting with the hive of scum and villainy in which we first meet our eponymous Mandalorian, acquiring and delivering his quarry to an employer who turns out to be played by none other than Carl Weathers, the first of two legendary septuagenarians to appear in this first episode.

It's both brave and interesting to have an amoral bounty hunter protagonist who isn't particularly talkative, and whose depths as a character will be left to unfold slowly- and that's even before we get to the fact that, like Judge Dredd, he never removes his helmet.

The tone isn't unrelentingly grim and gritty, though- this is Star Wars. So we get the mystery of who is the Mandalorian's new employer and his hired former Imperial Stormtroopers- said employer played, bizarrely by auteur Bavarian director Werner Herzog- and his elliptically discussed target. We get Taika Waititi as IG-11, a superbly animated CGI version of IG-88 from all our Kenner plastic figure childhoods. We get the physical comedy of our protagonist trying to ride a Blurgg- a female one, of course, as he males are always eaten during mating.

Intriguingly, too, we get some back story- our hero is paid in Biskar, a substance which he gives to a Mandalorian woman who seems to be an armourer for unspecified but perhaps ritual purposes that hint at a forgotten history and culture, no doubt to be explored further. We even get teasing flashbacks.

We end with a sadly much-spoiled revelation that the target is a cute baby Yoda. This may be thirty-eight minutes of pure fan service, with the carbonite and the land speeders, but it's bloody good fan service. I'm already hooked.