Almost nine years ago, a Pawnee citizen by the name of Garth Blunden, played by Patton Oswalt in a guest appearance, filibustered a town-hall meeting in season five of Parks and Recreation with a bit of inspiration from Marvel and Star Wars. Oswalt’s speech has become one of the show’s most famous moments — and it may even have been a little prophetic. The first episode of The Book of Boba Fett, a spinoff of The Mandalorian, features a scene that matches part of the filibuster nearly to a T. Here’s Oswalt’s Blunden:
Pan down from the twin suns of Tatooine. We are now close on the mouth of the Sarlacc pit. After a beat, the gloved Mandalorian armor gauntlet of Boba Fett grabs onto the sand outside the Sarlacc pit, and the feared bounty hunter pulls himself from the maw of the sand beast, and we realize that he survived his fall during the battle at Jabba’s palace ship.
And watch that actually happen on the new Disney+ show. “To say I’m touched is putting it lightly,” Oswalt tweeted with the clip. Last year, in an interview with Observer, he talked about improvising the Parks and Rec speech entirely based off his own Star Wars knowledge. “They didn’t yell cut, so I didn’t want to be unprofessional and stop, so the panic kind of locked in, and I guess my response was to dump every bit of Star Wars and pop-culture trivia I have in my brain,” he said. Oswalt added on Twitter that The Book of Boba Fett “rocks.” What do we have to do to get him into that writer’s room? Favreau?
