Have Gungans appeared on or been referenced in The Mandalorian thus far?
Very mild spoilers for anyone who hasn’t seen Chapter 6 of the Mandalorian in particular, and the series in general, follow, so read at your own risk.
Six episodes of The Mandalorian have aired so far, and for the first time, Gungans have finally gotten some sort of mention.
In the episode The Prisoner, the Mandalorian takes on a job to rescue a former associate of his, who is being held on a New Republic prison ship. He is forced to team up with a group of undesirables in order to attempt to free the Twi’lek Qin.
Bill Burr, best known as Saul Goodman’s associate who isn’t Huell on Breaking Bad, plays Mayfeld, a former Imperial sharpshooter. He doesn’t understand The Mandalorian’s refusal to take his helmet off and gets confrontational about it.
“I wonder what you look like under there. Maybe he’s a Gungan.” Mayfeld says, before slipping into a vaguely Gungan accent, “Is that why yousa don’t wanna show your face?”
I believe this might be the first time that a non-Gungan has been shown on screen mimicking Gungan speech. Could this be an indirect reference to International Talk Like Jar Jar Binks Day? It seems likely.
Although it’s unfortunate that Mayfeld felt the need to disrespect and mock Gungans in the episode, he’s clearly a pretty bad guy, so it’s not surprising. Regardless it’s still nice to have some sort of reference to our favorite species in the show.
I’m still holding out hope that we’ll see actual Gungans in the show at some point. We’ve already seen several well known Star Wars species already, such as Jawas and Tusken Raiders. I don’t think it’ s out of the realm of possibilities that one or more Gungans could show up in the future. Knowing that Dave Filoni is an executive producer of the show and director of some episodes, gives me even more hope. He featured Jar Jar and other Gungans in several episodes of the Clone Wars. One of his early concepts for the entire Clone Wars series even featured a crew of individuals going on missions during the war, and one of those crew members was a Gungan named Lunker. (This concept was later revived for Rebels, with the Lunker role being taken by Zeb.)
Time will tell whether whether Gungans will factor into any future plots of The Mandalorian. Time will also tell whether Bill Burr will participate in future International Talk Like Jar Jar Binks Day.
Chapter 7 of the Mandalorian will be available to stream on December 18, 2019 on Disney+.
Tags: gungan, gungans, star wars, starwars, the mandalorian