Almost two months after the premiere of the first episode of The Mandalorian, the Baby Yoda memes are still going strong, evolving to the point where they’ve now even branched out into the horror genre.
When The Mandalorian first premiered on Disney+ in mid-November, it was met with instant acclaim. It is one of the most well-received pieces of media from Lucasfilm since it was purchased by Disney in 2012. The praise for the show only seemed to get stronger as episodes were released. Save a few outliers, namely Episode 5, “The Gunslinger” with its relatively “low” Rotten Tomatoes score of 73%, its approval increased as the season progressed. The show’s final two episodes have, at the time of writing, a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes, confirming creator John Favreau yet again as a hitmaker.
Episode one, “The Mandalorian,” takes place five years’ time after Star Wars: Return Of The Jedi, following the exploits of the helmeted Mandalorian (Pedro Pascal). A bounty hunter, he spends most of the first episode tracking down a target. At the end of the episode, he finds it: a small fifty-year-old creature that looks like an infant version of Yoda. His heart is as won-over as the audiences’; rather than kill the target, he adopts it. The original trilogy had Ewoks. The prequels had (unsuccessfully) Jar Jar Binks. The newest trilogy had Porgs and The Mandalorian has The Child, although the internet swiftly found another name for the adorable creature: Baby Yoda.
Immediately after episode one, “The Mandalorian” aired, people took to Twitter to talk about this sweet child that looked so much like fan-beloved Yoda. The memes began. After episode four, “Sanctuary”, aired in late November, memes hit a critical mass. This episode was the source of both the “Baby Yoda changing the music” meme, and “Baby Yoda drinks soup”. The first week of December, the search term “Baby Yoda” peaked, according to Google Trends.
People were drawn to the character’s large baleful eyes, tiny stature, massive ears, and impossibly teensy three-fingered hands. As the meme started to gain traction, it began to separate from the original source. It created a canon of its own, developing a shared language. Currently, the meme’s main themes are baby talk and infantilization. Baby Yoda asks for “chicky nuggies” and “choccy milk”, continuing the legacy of other childlike memes such as “smol”, “smol bean”, and “doggo”. Baby Yoda appealed to the child inside of everyone retweeting the content. Baby Yoda, wide-eyed and sweet-faced, represents childhood innocence.
As the meme continued along its evolutionary path, it began to leak into other types of pop culture, crossing Baby Yoda with classic movies and hit television shows. A surprising but gratifying turn for the meme was its foray into the horror genre. It starts innocently enough. Baby Yoda as Georgie in 2017’s IT, tempted into the sewers by promises of chicky nuggies, but soon moves into more graphic horror: Baby Yoda bursting from the chest of Kane (John Hurt) like the Xenomorph in Alien, all innocent looks surrounded by a pool of blood.
The popularity jettisoning crossovers between Baby Yoda and horror reached new heights as artists like LaurenRankinArt began to produce art depicting Baby Yoda like classic horror movie icons.
The comedy, and the reason this branch of the memes is so successful, comes from the disconnect between the sweetness of Baby Yoda and the horror of Horror. It breaks comedy downs to its very roots: taking something that doesn’t belong somewhere and putting it exactly there. It is the subversion of expectation. As the Baby Yoda meme rages on, fans can only speculate how it will evolve throughout the remainder of 2020, and what other strange paths it may turn down.
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