Spaghetti Western Trailer for The Mandalorian

Just as the original Star Wars movie was inspired by Flash Gordon and Kurosawa,¹ The Mandalorian is modelled on the western — a lone gunfighter makes his way through the wilderness to protect the innocent. As Mando star Pedro Pascal put it: “I think that George Lucas played with the Western undertones with the first movie, ‘Episode IV,’ and now they’re taking the suggestions of that tone and infusing it with steroids.” So naturally, it’s a great idea to make a trailer for The Mandalorian in the style of a Sergio Leone spaghetti western, complete with music by Ennio Morricone. Il Mandaloriano!

1. Lucas made Star Wars because he couldn’t get the rights to do a Flash Gordon movie. Who knew that “Flash Gordon as a samurai film” would be such a lucrative idea?↩

• Ennio Morricone
• movies
• remix
• Sergio Leone
• Star Wars
• The Mandalorian
• trailers

Duck You Sucker: An Intro to Spaghetti Westerns

Today’s entry in the A.V. Club’s Gateways to Geekery series is Spaghetti Westerns. Want to get into Spaghetti Westerns, but feeling a little sheepish (If God didn’t want them sheared, he wouldn’t have made them sheep) about not knowing where to start? Gateways to Geekery suggests A Fistful of Dollars.

It’s an adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s cynical samurai masterpiece Yojimbo, which was itself inspired by Dashiell Hammett’s noir classic Red Harvest. And thus, an American TV actor became a movie star playing a cowboy for an Italian director working in Spain looking to a Japanese interpretation of an American crime novel for inspiration. It really is a small world after all, or at least a world pop culture helped make smaller.

You might also be interested in the Gateways to Geekery take on David Foster Wallace.

(via oh yes, radishes)

• Clint Eastwood
• movies
• Sergio Leone