This week, the Mandalorian news exploded – people freaked out about the ‘Jeans Guy’ gaffe, jokes and Tweets aplenty about what would otherwise be a trivial production issue. Here’s the thing: the Jeans Guy’ on The Mandalorian doesn’t matter, full stop. Production gaffes happen all the time. In fact, an editor on Reddit provides a simple answer to why the Jeans Guy was in there at all:
Editor here! The editor wouldn’t be fired, people love to blame the editor when there’s a mistake and praise the director when things are amazing, but in reality it’s all a mix.
Jeans Guy is also fine, there’s usually 4-10 times the amount of people behind the scenes than there are in front of the camera, jeans guy couldn’t see the camera, he thought he was out of frame, the script supervisor, the director, the producer, or the director of photography (just the few that pop to mind could have caught this as it was happening).
As far as post production, the editor saw this. Most likely showed the cut to the director/producer to wait and see if they noticed and then would bring jeans Guy to their attention.
Usually mistakes like this are in every big production, however, on a first watch, most people won’t notice because they’re distracted by the main plot that’s grabbing your attention. So professionals will sometimes knowingly let it slide.
The editor probably found takes where jeans guy wasn’t there but the director most likely said, no this take is the best and to add some airbrushing or cropping to get rid of jeans guy. However, on tv shows, time crunches, this either fell through the cracks and was forgot about or they just didn’t have the time to get it done, knowing that most people wouldn’t notice on one watch.
See? It really wasn’t a big deal at all. Relax, and go back to shopping for things you don’t need on Amazon. The next episode of The Mandalorian comes out on Friday, you’ll need to be ready.