Jon Favreau on Baby Yoda & filling in the gaps of the Star Wars timeline

It feels as though the entire world has fallen in love with Baby Yoda, and I certainly can't blame them; He's adorable, tiny, green, and using the Force makes him sleepy. While speaking with THR, The Mandalorian creator Jon Favreau spoke about the creation of Baby Yoda, known as The Child on the series, and why fans are so interested in him.

He's mostly a puppet. When it's CG, we try to make him obey the same physical laws that he would if he were a puppet. I think a lot of times CG makes itself too obvious where you don't create parameters creatively that allow the character to keep the same identity and charm. … We'll learn more about him over the course of the season. I think what's great about what George created is that Yoda proper, the character that we grew up watching, was always shrouded in mystery, and that was what made him so archetypal and so mythic. We know who he is based on his behavior and what he stands for, but we don't know a lot of details about where he comes from or his species. I think that's why people are so curious about this little one of the same species.

The Mandalorian takes place a time-period which hasn't been explored all that much in the official canon. Taking place five years after STAR WARS: RETURN OF THE JEDI, there's still a handful of decades before we reach the events of STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS, but that doesn't mean that characters or stories which originate in The Mandalorian can't make an impact on STAR WARS movies or other TV shows. "There's definitely the opportunity to explore these characters beyond what we've presented on the show. There's a very fluid line between what's in the movie theaters and what's on the screen at home," Favreau said. "It's very exciting for me because I get to tell stories over the course of several hours and not just within the footprint of one theatergoing experience. I think it's only a matter of time before we cross paths the other way."

With the second season of The Mandalorian well underway, Jon Favreau said that he's working closely with Dave Filoni to chart the future of the series in the STAR WARS universe.

I'm putting a lot of effort working with Dave Filoni to figure out what the overarching story is and the storyline for all these characters and what the world is like. We want to make sure that we have a road map, because we're also a puzzle piece that fits into a larger Star Wars universe that has a lot of other movies and a lot of other projects, and we want to make sure we're consistent with them. We have a good 25-year patch of road [in the Star Wars canon] that nobody is exploring right now, and it's the most interesting time for me as a storyteller to explore — the time after the fall of the empire and before the resurgence of the darker forces.

You can check out reviews of Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, and Chapter 4 of The Mandalorian from our own Alex Maidy. The next episode will drop on Disney+ on December 6th.