The final two days of Star Wars Celebration this year have been great. Few panels, but still a great atmosphere and great interviews with guests on the Celebration Live stage. Saturday was definitely The Mandalorian day on the livestream, with the panels shown both having to do with the series. At the start of it, the Behind-the-Scenes panel gave a good look at concept art and the construction of both The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett.

The other panel was a Doug Chiang panel on Designing The Mandalorian. I loved his talk on designing The Phantom Menace during the last Celebration, and this one was no different. With designing the ship of The Razorcrest, the characters’ looks, and the creatures and worlds that would come to the series.

As his previous talks have shown, there’s a lot that goes into the design process. It needs to look right, and you can go through many passes of design before getting the right one, but even then, there’s things that can make the character not look how you want it. As demonstrated with Grogu. There were a few different versions of Grogu – including a demonic looking one that had popping human eyes.

We got a lot of concept art, how designs can be updated and reused to create new things, and getting into the details of the design of things even if they won’t be seen. The krayt dragon’s design is talked of here, and how it got it’s iconic design. He also talks of The Book of Boba Fett and how Downtown Mos Espa was a thing back in 1999, and how the idea of it being in a sinkhole was a part of the design from that time – even though we never saw it.

The day of The Mandalorian also stretched to the guests seen on the Celebration Live stage, where they brought out Pedro Pascal, Omid Abtahi, Giancarlo Esposito, and Rosario Dawson across the day. Dawson was accompanied by Natasha Liu Bordizzo – who is playing Sabine Wren in the Ahsoka TV series. The talk from all of these guests and the love that the fans showed was absolutely great to watch.

Star Wars: Hunters didn’t have its panel shown, and neither did the Tales of the Jedi panel, but a talk on the Celebration Live stage with people involved gave a few details of what happened during them. Hunters is still looking as good as I expected it to, as those characters look great. The team-based arena game is still without a release date, but I’m hopeful it will be fun.

Ganina Gavankar ended the third day talking of Tales of the Jedi and her history on Star Wars on the Celebration Live stage, bringing the news from the Tales of the Jedi panel that she would be playing Ahsoka Tano’s mother. From the article about that panel on StarWars.com, it is a new series that looks at the younger years of significant Jedi, with Count Dooku being another focus of it. I’m certainly going to be watching that.

Day 4 being the last started with a bang. Anthony Daniels came onto the Celebration Live stage for an absolutely great conversation with Anthony Carboni – the other rivalry of Celebration that’s absolutely great every time it happens. From Daniels first interrupting the introduction of the day to great applause, they then get into a fight and put into action the fact they could do each other’s jobs. Which went as well as you’d expect.

Talk of The Bad Batch happened throughout the day with various guests talking the past and future of the series. It all kicked off with showing the trailer on Celebration Live then bringing some of the creators on to talk of the first season. That trailer has me hyped. Clone Commandos and more of Delta squad (or at least one of them). Rex returns, as does Cody – so them being on opposite sides should be interesting to see play out. And Gungi! The Wookiee Jedi from the youngling arc of The Clone Wars. It would be great to see all of those younglings come back, but we have the best one.

And speaking of coming back, the Emperor is here. Just what presence he’ll have remains to be seen, but he’s important enough to appear in this trailer, so the Batch have obviously got on the wrong side of him. And while we don’t see them here, I still think we’ll be getting Wolffe and Gregor appear with that line of taking every ally they can get.

From Friday, they aired the 35 Years of Star Tours panel. I remember this ride from when I was in Florida back in 2008, so seeing its history told was great. From the earliest days of that original ride, we got a clip of that original version, as well as a part of the opening ceremony for it. Then onto the newer additions to it that brought a lot more journeys to discover while riding it.

For the closing ceremony, they started off with a great video showing off some happenings across the days with small interview snippets about how it’s been a hard time across the pandemic without the ability to see other in person. We also got to see that great moment between John Williams and Harrison Ford, along with parts of other panels we hadn’t seen.

And that video – as well as the visiting of all the stages after it – showcased the greatness of the fans. The excitement that they have for the franchise. It’s always great to be watching these events because of that. The energy they bring shows just how much love they have for this franchise. And the actors repay that with their stories and acknowledgement of that energy.

Rupert Friend – who plays the Grand Inquisitor on Obi-Wan Kenobi – joined the Celebration stage to talk a bit of his first experience of Celebration, and bring the announcement of when the next Celebration will be. And where it will be. It comes to London again! Celebration is coming to London again! In April! This time, I absolutely want to go.

Watching the livestream is great, I won’t deny that. It’s always a fun time. Even with the lesser focus on panels in recent times, there’s still a lot of enjoyment to be had from the interviews of the Celebration Live stage. But watching the livestream will never compare to the experience of being there and sharing that energy with all the fans.

After all, it’s not just about the panels. It’s not just about the Celebration Live stage. There’s a whole lot more going on around those things. A lot to see around the venue, with merchandise stalls, all those life-size vehicles that get set up, games, food, signings, and even more. It’s always a big thing, and definitely something every fan should attempt to go to at least once in their life. And I’m going to do my best to go next year. Should I do so, Star Wars Celebration Europe 2023 will be the greatest of these events to me no matter what reveals appear at future ones.

Images Taken From:
Star Wars Celebration LIVE! – Day 3
Star Wars Celebration LIVE! – Day 4