Disney Is About To Blanket The Earth In Baby Yoda ‘Mandalorian’ Toys After Holding Back

Star Wars fans looking at the mountain of Baby Yoda toys about to arrive

Disney

With the arrival of The Mandalorian, Disney had a problem. They could see that Jon Favreau’s show had created what was arguably the cutest Star Wars character in the history of the franchise. That would be “The Child,” which fans refer to as Baby Yoda, despite it not actually being Yoda, but rather a youngling in the unnamed, force-powerful species.

The problem was that Baby Yoda’s reveal was something that Favreau really, really wanted to keep a secret before the show’s debut, and usually the way leaks get out for this sort of thing is through retail merchandising, and so there are no official Baby Yoda toys ready to go alongside the launch of the show. This no doubt irked Disney, who above all else, sees Star Wars as a merchandising cash machine, but it appears that some sort of arrangement was made.

Favreau would get a short period of secrecy around Baby Yoda ahead of launch, allowing the first Disney+ customers to see his reveal (which happens 30 minutes into the series) organically. But after that? All bets were off.

As of this past week, Disney has been openly posting about Baby Yoda on all its social channels, spoiling the reveal themselves, and well before that, no one could resist turning Baby Yoda into the internet’s latest meme. He was simply inescapable.

Baby Yoda

Disney

But now that the cat is out of the bag for almost everyone (sorry non-North American people who don’t get Disney Plus for another six months), Disney is reportedly about to salt the earth with Baby Yoda merchandise in the final month before Christmas, because of course they weren’t going to miss that chance.

According to inside info from CNBC, Amazon, Zazzle, Target, Kohl’s, Macy’s, Hot Topic and Box Lunch are all about to get licensed Baby Yoda merchandise to put on sale ahead of the holiday season, from toys to clothes and everything in between. Previously, Baby Yoda has only been sold by unlicensed Etsy dealers, but that’s about to change massively.

The events of the show seem to indicate that Baby Yoda is a core part of the series, at least in this first season, and as such will be a presence in the series for the next five weeks at least, and every Friday we will be talking about what cute thing he did this week (yesterday, playing with The Mandalorian’s ship controls, or his ears flapping in the wind). So he’s not going anywhere and we will keep seeing him and products for him until we end up breaking through his cuteness and being sick of him. Well, we’ll see, anyway.

So buy those Etsy products while you can, because soon most of the merch will be lining Disney’s pockets directly. I would expect this launch to happen in time for Black Friday, so stay tuned.

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