The first season of The Mandalorian included plenty of Easter eggs, but some of the ones featured here might just take the cake as being some of the series' best.
The opening shows off some Gamorreans (Jabba's guards from Return of the Jedi) having a gladiatorial fight, and then when Mando and The Child arrive at Peli's dock we're greeted by none other than R5, who you may recall exploded in Episode IV, leading to Uncle Owen purchasing R2D2. (Fun fact, the anthology book From a Certain Point of View reveals that R5 intentionally self destructed so that R2 could escape the Jawas, so he's essentially a war hero.)
Arguably the coolest egg of all, though, is Vanth's ride. His speeder is literally one of the engines from Anakin Skywalker's Boonta Eve podracer, last seen in The Phantom Menace. Or at least, it's a very similar pod-race engine. It feels too identical for it to be anything else though.
WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well.
In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.
