https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/59n8jq/the-mandalorian-is-the-future-of-star-wars

My parents taught me to enjoy Star Wars. To this day, my mother speaks of the Mos Eisley cantina scene in A New Hope with reverence. The strange aliens built using practical effects, the weird clicks and blurbles of the creatures, the severed arm of Ponda Baba. The cantina scene established the Star Wars universe as something bigger than the Jedi and the Empire. It was a mythological world big enough for smugglers, bastards, and frontier violence. The Mandalorian, Disney’s new live action Star Wars television series, lives in the spaces unoccupied by the Jedi. It thrives in the places the Empire left behind. It’s a show built from pieces first established in the Mos Eisley cantina.

George Lucas based Star Wars, in part, on the serial adventure films he enjoyed as a child. Star Wars exists because he couldn’t get the rights to Flash Gordon. Those original serials ran in 20 minute segments as part of a larger movie reel. Star Wars was always confined by its need to be a big story on the big screen. To justify a two-hour run time, Star Wars films needed to be about a Galactic Empire and the battle between the Dark and Light sides of the force.