Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! The Bisbee Deportions & The Bisbee Riot

WYTS: Arizona Cardinals. Original post here.

Our history lesson today is about the town of Bisbee, Arizona. Currently, it is a former mining town in the southeast corner of the state. Its population has halved in the last century, now down to under 5,000 people. I do not expect you to know of it, it is not a place of much importance anymore. But Bisbee has a lot of history. We actually have two events, one in 1917 and another in 1919. There are The Bisbee Deportations and The Bisbee Riot. 

 

These civil unrests are the byproducts of World War I, a war which ended poorly for everybody involved. Three empire fell, and even the winning side was left in terrible shape. If anybody can be said to have "won WWI", it was the United States, whose global rivals were in ruins and the US was the dominant superpower for the rest of the century, whether we liked it or not. And even we left that war with a decade of reactionary conservative and racist politics, the repercussions of which we still suffer from now. To get to President Harding's vision of "Normalcy" required a lot of violence on both the labor and racial fronts. Bisbee, interestingly, had a big labor battle right before a racial battle, possibly a clue that race and labor concerns are directly related. We'll explore that idea further as this project continues.

 

Bisbee was a town of about 10,000 in 1917. It was a major source of copper thanks to its open pit strip mining operation, the Copper Queen Mine run by the Phelps Dodge Corporation. Copper, being a strategic war material, was a very turbulent commodity in the market. Prices were going up and down all over the place. Miners had their wages tied to the price of copper, so you'd never know if you'd be going hungry from one week to another. The workers wanted a better deal. This was a really dangerous, unpredictable, and pardon the pun, extractive industry, where foreign Slavic workers were usually mistreated. The miners wanted $6.00 per hour, the company wanted them to literally drop dead pulling out the copper ore. There are many, many big mining labor battles in this era, and battles are the correct term. Broncos fans (such as myself), watch this space.

In 1917 the miners went on strike, daring the company to do their worst. Their worst they got. Phelps Dodge responded by making the local sheriff, Harry C. Wheeler, basically military dictator of the surrounding county. He cut off all communications to the outside. On July 12th, 1917, during a labor action, Wheeler gathered a posse of 2,000 men and then grabbed 1,300 people off the streets. Most of them were strikers, some were supporters, some were just random people watching the show. The sheriff loaded these thousands of people onto cattle cars and dumped them in a random spot 200 miles away, leaving them with their lives and nothing else. It is possible they were all expected to just die out there in the desert. Luckily the state of Arizona and federal government did rescue everybody, with only one death reported. The workers were at least alive, but they were not welcome back in Bisbee. The strike was broken.

Cut to summer 1919 where labor tensions, unsurprisingly, have not cooled off. Turns out trying to massacre your employees does not end disputes forever. But there's more! WWI is over and a lot of black soldiers are coming home, scaring the bejesus out of white America. President Wilson, a guy who's racial record was... let's be nice and call it "mixed", did not do the greatest job in terms of integrating his men back home. Instead many black soldiers returned to the Red Summer, a series of pogroms across the country. These included incidents as varied as major urban riots in Chicago, Washington DC, and Philadelphia. There was a particularly horrible incident in Elaine, Arkansas where maybe as many as 240 people were murdered.

 

The Red Summer was not the same thing as the Red Scare, just to clarify. That was a separate anti-Bolshevik panic coinciding with major strike waves across the country, much of which involved the coal industry, to return to mining. We did win WWI, but the economy had been wrecked and people were very unsure of what would come next. Oh, also the Spanish Flu epidemic is ravaging the country too. 1919 is just one of those years like 1848 or 1968 or 2020. Just a real bad time.

In Bisbee, on July 3rd, a group of Buffalo Soldiers from the 10th Cavalry had come to town to take part in the Independence Day Parade scheduled the next day. The 10th Cavalry had not traveled to France, but this is a very distinguished unit, they fought in the Indian Wars and saved Roosevelt's ass on San Juan Hill and fought in the Philippines. That night they got a tip by some IWW Union organizers in Bisbee that the local police were planning to attack them. We don't know what was planned since it none of it went to plan. I should note that Sheriff Wheeler is no longer in power, he had gone to France to fight Germans and was a little busy with some legal troubles I'll get back to. The problem now is Bisbee Chief of Police, James Kempton.

 

Instead of an easy repeat of the Bisbee Deportations from 1917, we have the Bisbee Riot, where the 10th cavalry were in a full-on gunfight with the sheriff department in the town, in an area called Brewery Gulch, a red light district the local soldiers enjoyed. This is event is sometimes called The Battle of Brewery Gulch. They were not going out without a fight at least.  After a few hours of shooting, around midnight, the Buffalo Soldiers realized this could not go on forever. They surrendered and disarmed themselves, but not without regrets. One unarmed soldier was shot in the chest by a deputy just for fun, seemingly. The whole event probably had been staged to give the cops an excuse to murder the 10th Cavalry, though I do not think they expected this fierce of resistance. The next morning, Chief Kempton and the County Sheriff gave up and let everybody go home.

Now this could have been a lot worse, if not for the fact that agents of the Bureau of Investigation were in town. They were here trying to catch the IWW as Bolshevik agents undermining America. Instead they realized this town was a nightmare run by an evil corporation and a lynch mob police force. The feds actually helped defuse the situation. 

 

In the riots there no deaths, just the previously mentioned injured soldier and one poor bystander lady who was shot in the head. Nobody was punished on either side. 

 

Sheriff Wheeler, though, for his role in the Bisbee Deportions, faced federal charges. However, the Supreme Court decided in 1920 that the US Constitution does not protect citizens from being kidnapped, even if that means being rounded by a sheriff and left to die hundreds of miles from help. That's a matter for state courts, not federal.

Phelps-Dodge is now part of Freeport-McMoRan Inc. and is still mining copper to this day around the world. If you'd like, you can buy some shares right now!

Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! The New York City Draft Riots

WYTS: New York Jets. Original post here.

There’s a lot of history in New York, and we’d need a lot more NFL teams to cover every single big riot in this area. There's at least five important ones that deserve their own entries. I regret not picking Stonewall for one of the two I covered in retrospect... Maybe we need a bonus episode at the end.

One of the two riots was the New York City Draft Riots of 1863, one of the largest civil unrest events in American history, maybe the biggest, unless you count the Civil War itself. You might remember this riot sabotaging the ending fight between Amsterdam and Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York, a Scorsese movie too good to be spoiled by a terrible DiCaprio performance.

Through its history up until the Civil War, New York always had a… complicated relationship with slavery, let’s say. It was a major slave trading port in the 1700s. One of the first riots in American history happened right here in 1712 when about 23 African slaves attempted a revolt for their freedom, only to be shot down, and many were executed in horrible manner by being burnt on the stake. A second riot happened in 1741, which either was an aborted slave revolt or just an imagined conspiracy that got out of hand, which also ended in mass executions. After the Revolution and slavery's ending in New York, the city had no problem doing business with the cotton plantations, making a lot of money in the process. Lehman Brothers, the infamous 2008 Great Recession bank, got started as a cotton trading firm before moving to NY in 1858, for example. These trading ties were so important some business leaders wanted New York City itself to secede as a neutral free city when the Civil War broke out.

Meanwhile, as Scorsese and DiCaprio teach us, there was a huge immigrant population, especially important being Irish immigrants. The Five Points were an infamous slum, so infamous that European tourists would take a visit as part of their American vacations, notably Charles Dickens. The Catholic population, largely Irish, were expanding rapidly in 1840s, thanks to the famine at home, and this brought all sorts of social troubles. You have the gangs of course, .DiCaprio's Amsterdam character did not actually found the Dead Rabbits, they a major Irish gang well before then. They would have their biggest battle with their rivals, the Bowery Boys in 1857, a riot that killed 8 people. (There's a lot of riots in NYC! Did I mentioned that?) Many cities on the East Coast in 1800s had these sorts of gang problems, especially in Baltimore, we'll circle back to this later, get hype, Ravens fans. 

Tammany Hall, the political machine that is noted as one of the most corrupt in American history, actually did a lot to create a place in NYC for these people. I think Nativist bigotry ended up writing a lot of the history on the old-style political machines. You could be right off the boat but still have a personal relationship with a person in power who could affect change for the better. Which made a lot of the older Protestant "natives" very angry. You could do a lot worse in the vast and varied unseemly history of American politics, let's say. Also, it is not like New York got less corrupt after the machine politics ended, just the government started working for business interests, not voter patronage.

We must mention that there was a large free black population in Manhattan of about 12,500. That is not enormous in a city of 800,000 plus, but their position at the bottom of society was now a radical question thanks to a war over slavery, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the rise of the Republican party. Republicans were in opposition to Tammany Democrats. There was a lot of fear in NYC that newly-freed slaves would suddenly crowd into Manhattan and weaken the job market. Racism does not need a logic, but labor concerns are a major factor in all of this. (We'll get back to this a lot.)

July 1863 is a huge month for Civil War nerds: Lee is invading Pennsylvania, itching for a fight he’s going to lose, Grant is closing the noose around Vicksburg, and the third major battle is right here in Manhattan. Tensions have been broiling in the city since March, when Congress passed the Enrollment Act, the first wide-national conscription in American history. Before this, Union Army regiments had been either volunteer or conscripted by their local states (we won't really have the uniform federal army you recognize today until the 20th century). The Civil War was not terribly popular in NYC by either the immigrants or the older WASP crowds, and it is not getting more popular with an impending draft event on July 11th. Copperhead Democrats became increasingly furious that New York will have to sacrifice itself further for a Republican and anti-slavery war. Newspapers begin publishing hysterical anti-war and very racist screeds - never a good sign for civil unrest incidents. 

Most importantly, the city's garrison is very undermanned as they had some problems on Cemetery Ridge and Little Round Top to deal with.

The first day of the drafting actually went fine,. It's the second day of drafting, July 13th, 1863, where the city exploded. This is an interesting event for a lot of reasons, one of which is many of the rioters were Irish, but so were the police, the heavily-Irish and brand new Metropolitan Police led by Superintendent John Kennedy (not that one). By the way, this police force had only been in existence for a few years, they had a full-on gang battle with the older Municipal Police Force in 1857 - there are many many riots in NYC's history. 

But let's focus: the revolt starts at about 10:00 AM on a Monday at 3rd Ave and 47th Street, in the NYC 9th Provost building. This is actually to the north of the famous Five Points. The Five Points, despite what the great historian, Martin Scorsese tells us, did not really get that involved in this event. Lower Manhattan had some chaos, but the fighting was centered in Midtown. About 500 angry men, led by a fire engine company nicknamed the Black Joke, start throwing rocks and paving stones through the windows. They smash into the draft, taking control of the room, burning everything. The volunteer firefighters have ironically become arsonists, the whole building burns down. They also fight off any other firemen who come by. Superintendent Kennedy arrived on the scene with his Metro Police. He's recognized even out of uniform by the rioters, and Kennedy is nearly assassinated, with 70 stab wounds. At this point, the mob begins a march around the city, just destroying whatever they really felt like. The city's arsenal fell by the late-afternoon.

Their targets during these riots were numerous and diverse. Most tragic would be the Colored Orphan Asylum on 44th Street, which was a major charity organization. The 237 orphans were able to escape thanks to the police fighting back the mob, but the building was looted and burnt down. The offices of the abolitionist paper, The New York Tribune were also destroyed. The pro-Republican, New York Times (what else has changed, am I right?) survived thanks to Henry Raymond, its founder, personally defending the Gray Lady with gatling guns, first appearance of these weapons, not the last. A lot of this also just became an old-fashioned racial pogrom, with random black people lynched and hanged, one poor man was set on hanged and set on fire. The black tenements by the waterfront were burnt. The white wealthy were not spared either, especially if you were a known-Republican. Brooks Brothers was looted.

Fresh Union troops would not make it to Manhattan until Wednesday, the 15th. Lee's army had retreated back into Virginia, ending any farfetched hope of a Southern victory, so troops were available to recapture Gotham. These new soldiers began pushing into rioting areas. By Friday there were 6,000 soldiers in the city and the Draft Riots were crushed. 

The final death toll in in dispute. Some reports say just 18 deaths, which sounds impossibly low. Another has 120, but then you'll find wildly high numbers like 1,200 killed. Ultimately, nobody knows and until very recently, whatever casualty numbers you read from civil disturbances or other kinds of disasters are going to be total guesses. These estimates are usually on the low-end as the governments involved undercount people they do not care about. I would not be that surprised if the death toll from the Draft Riots are well into the hundreds. It was very bad, the worst riot in New York's history by far. And there were a lot of riots.

One part of the story I was unhappy to learn was how successful this pogrom actually was. The black population of Manhattan dropped to pre-1820 levels, several thousand left and never returned. Many of the survivors migrated to Brooklyn or other areas. You can still see these racial lines in Manhattan today. Bobby Womack's 'Across 110th Street' is a banger and an accurate picture of the demographic lines even today. Harlem was not even settled yet in the 1860s, that would be a brand new development when it had its Renaissance in the 20th century. 

The planned draft that sparked this whole riot actually was completed a few weeks later without incident. President Lincoln appointed General John Dix to make sure New York City finished its conscription process. In the end, fewer New Yorkers got drafted anyway than the panicked Copperheads imagined. The South lost the war, in case you didn't know, and New York just kept on making tons and tons of money without needing a slave economy to drive its engines.

Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! 1969 West Las Vegas Riots

Preface: 

This all started as a gag. Defector is doing their annual roast of the 32 NFL teams, from worst to best. I'm a very heavy commenter there, I've written short fiction in the comments and occasionally shorter movie reviews that are not worth full publication. Seems like people tolerate my brand of nonsense reasonably well, I've gotten decent upvote scores. For the last couple of years, I've been doing series in the comments of 'Why Your Team Sucks' entries, last year it was short biographies of the worst Americans I could find from each city featured. Let's Remember a (Real Bad) Guy featured people like our traitorous, deeply incompetent General James Wilkinson or arch racists like Hoke Smith or extremely obvious picks like George W. Bush. This year I'm doing Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest!, which are stories about riots, strikes, or just one flat-out military battle in or around each city the football team plays in. Usually these are parts of a city's history that almost nobody remembers, parts of American history very powerful interests would prefer we not think about. They were supposed to be like 300 words max and just real short, informative, sometimes humorous things.

Instead this blew up rapidly and nearly all of them are about 1,500 words or more. They got longer quickly. My weakness as a writer is that I will either write nothing at all, or I'll write way too much. Many of these events were too awful to really keep a humorous tone about, just felt like these under-explored elements of history needed detail, and as accurate of reporting as I could give. It is a ridiculous amount of work to do, especially with a demanding full time job and long commutes, so this is amateur work done quickly and admittedly sloppily. I did get to use my BA in History for something at least. But these 32 riots/battles actually do come together to make a halfway decent history of race and labor relations across 200 years in this country, just out of order. If you ever want to know where my politics come from, it's from knowing about events like these.

Also, people kept asking for an easier way to find them. A lot of comments were like "this is great, how do I find the other ones?" So I'm reposting them here, with some revisions, I did make a few factual errors I want to correct. This first one for the Las Vegas Raiders was done very quickly so it is largely rewritten. The other 31 will come out over the course of the next couple of weeks. Original post can be found here.https://defector.com/why-your-team-sucks-2026-las-vegas-raiders?commentID=09f6ffa3-3e8e-4511-934d-d6098233a52ahttps://defector.com/why-your-team-sucks-2026-las-vegas-raiders?commentID=09f6ffa3-3e8e-4511-934d-d6098233a52a

... 

America's history is littered with some real unpleasantness and a great deal of it has been forgotten or ignored. Today's subject would be better-remembered if the Raiders still played in a real city like Oakland, but since they moved to a theme park in the desert, we will instead cover the 1969 West Las Vegas Riots, a much more obscure event.

There have been thousands of riots in American cities. In the 1800s, they were very diverse and could be about anything from Shakespeare to vegetarianism to labor tensions. We'll get to many of those stories. But in the 20th century, especially after World War II, riots began to take on a very familiar pattern. We could easily cover 32 events exactly like this one about the same things. I don't want to do that because it will be repetitive and depressing and maybe even pornographic at a certain point. I will cover the major ones such as Detroit (get hype, Lions fans!). But as you read this, know there is a century of history of undesired peoples in urban areas, brutalized by ever-more aggressive policing, and at certain points this explodes. People can easily mock these riots as self-defeating and "destroying their own homes", riots are not usually praxis. They are societies breaking down and do not need to make sense, also there are two actors in a riot: the rioters and the police. Explosions don't just happen, they are made to happen.

 

1969 West Las Vegas is just an example, but just know: this has happened everywhere.

 

Vegas was a boom town through much of the 20th century, and of course, this is America, so even into the middle of nowhere, we need to export our segregation. "The Mississippi of the West" is what the NAACP called Vegas. At first it really was like a Southern colony in the desert. A lot of the mobsters founded it were from an infamous bootlegger lawless resort city pre-Vegas, what is nicknamed "the Free State of Galveston". Galveston being Texas, and that means Jim Crow. Infamously Sammy Davis Jr could perform in Vegas, but was not allowed to say in the hotels. He could sing about gambling in Ocean's 11, but due to his skin color, he could not actually play craps at the Sands or the Riviera. The Civil Rights Movement had to extend this far out into the desert as well and would fight to integrate the main casinos in the 1960s.

 

But what we think of as Vegas is technically unincorporated land in a legal fiction called Paradise, Nevada. It also does not represent the entire city at all. Westside Vegas, on the literal other side of the train tracks, was the poorer, less developed area. It was the black neighborhood neglected by the city, in some cases lacking electricity or plumbing. There was a brief flourishing of a rival "Black Strip" around Jackson Avenue. It had a few nightclubs inspired by the Harlem Renaissance and smaller casinos modeled on "Vegas" (still technically Paradise). However, these businesses seem to have struggled. A very ambitious integrated casino in 1955 called the Moulin Rouge Hotel floundered that same year. People really wanted to make something better of West Vegas, but it never happened. Post-integration, the Black Strip really had no reason to exist. The entertainment venues declined, and this area only kept getting worse.

 

By the late-60s, the country was deeply on edge, and we'll cover a lot of the reasons why. There have been two major waves of urban riots in '67 and '68. African Americans everywhere feel harassed by over-policing and redlining and the predictable problems of the mid-20th century.

 

Today's event begins on Oct. 5th, 1969, when the police pull over a speeding taxi driver in Westside. One of the cops is actually black himself, Robert Arrington, which is rare since police forces were overwhelming white in this era. Meanwhile, a local black man named Gerald Davis just happened to be outside fixing his mother's car and sees his buddy, the taxi driver, in a bad police interaction. Davis probably should not have gotten involved. But when he did, the cops took this very personally. They followed Davis back to his mother's house nearby, saw that he had a legally-owned firearm, and decided to violently arrest him. Then they stormed inside, macing everybody, including his Mom. At this point, 150 onlookers are watching what is a snowballing situation. They begin to chant and protest, since all of them are familiar with this pattern of intimidation and cruelty. This goes on for hours, simmering, but not quite a riot yet. The evening ended with a tense stand-off, hundreds of cops and protesters focused at a strip mall around the corner. The police do retreat, trying to not set this off worse than it has.

 

However, the next day, the 6th, the riots seem to have truly begun. Two white men drove into the strip mall and were beaten by the protestors. The rioters armed themselves with molotov cocktails and were in open revolt against the Vegas police. There is the usual pattern of looting, sniping at police officers, and almost 40 blocks of the city in chaos. The battle would rage for about two more nights, with two deaths on the 8th, both involving an attempting robbery. At this point the West Vegas riots seem to have lost their energy and peace was restored. The mayor never needed to call in the National Guard. It could have been - and was - much worse in other cities.

 

It is very difficult to find sourcing on this riot, there is not even a Wikipedia article on it. I was able to confirm details with local newspaper reports from the time. I am reasonably sure this is accurate. Some events are better-remembered than others. You will find a Wikipedia article on the West Vegas Riot in 1992 in response to the Rodney King verdict (get hype, Rams fans). West Vegas did not feel any better about its place in the social structure decades later. I've been to Vegas a couple of times, each time I stepped off the Strip it felt like I was in Fallout, so I imagine this is still a very rough area.

 

Anyway, 31 teams to go. I'll keep reposting these. 

The Odyssey and the Current War: We Will Not Return From This

I will talk about the movie in this essay. This is going to connect to Christopher Nolan's new movie The Odyssey... eventually. However, we have a bummer of an opening first, then historical/philosophical context to get through. Maybe step out now if you're having a good day, I don't want to spoil that. If you just want to know about how cool the ocean looked in IMAX or if the cyclops was awesome, I'll write that review at the end of year when I'm doing my Top 15. First I have some other stuff to talk about.

In the poem and movie, it takes Odysseus ten years to come home from the east after destroying Troy in Homer's epic. He was the military genius who made possible the sacking of city that included the rape of innocent women, the murder of babies, the annihilation of a nation from history forever. The gods are punishing Odysseus. They are also granting him and his island kingdom, Ithica, a kind of mercy. Thousands of years later, outside the world of myths and gods, we live in the United States, in the general European "West". We still go east, and we still destroy. But no gods will be merciful to us.

On February 28th, 2026, the US military fired a missile into the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, Iran just next to the Sayyid al-Shuhada military complex. The attack was ordered by sloppy leaders based on faulty intelligence, just one of the many miscalculations in a war that was based on complete fantasies. There was no coup d'état, no quick victory, no easy way out of the conflict, and nobody wanted this*. Our government just did it on a whim, erupting a quagmire of confusion and incompetence that has lasted months and destroyed the freedom of global trade. In a way though, commerce and politics feel trite compared to the human impact of this one act. It feels disgusting to worry about gas prices when you consider the infinitely larger cost to the families in Iran. We do not yet know whether this particular attack was an accident or an intentional act of terror. Intentions matter a lot less when you look at these kinds of consequences. The missile collided with the structure, exploding instantly, causing the roof of the school to collapse sometime around 10:30 AM, only minutes after the American-Israeli joint attack on Iran began. They were hit before there was any hope of evacuation. 156 civilians were murdered. The estimate now is that 120 of them were little girls guilty of nothing more than sitting in a classroom.

We may never know the name of the operator who fired the missile, this soldier, agent, or contractor, just somebody who pressed a button. The person who fired that missile was probably sitting at a desk behind a computer in a room full of coworkers on a base. They took illegal orders from criminal officers, on the direction of a criminal civilian government, and pressed a button. On their screen, a little dot connected with some structure, followed by a flash, and that was as close as they ever got to their victims continents away. It was just another task in probably a very busy, very stressful day of many more buttons being pressed. Maybe they have reasonable deniability that it was their button and their missile that killed 156 people, 120 little girls.

I'm going to engage in some fiction writing to imagine who this person is, because we'll never have the truth, let alone justice. I imagine they were here in the US as they worked. Some minutes or hours later, this button-presser's shift ended and they left the room. I imagine they just clocked out, said goodbye to their exhausted coworkers, got in a car, and drove outside the military checkpoints, putting the war behind them. It is that easy to go from killing hundreds to going back home now. They drove on an American highway next to a thousand strangers in their own cars, no monsters, no adventures, just making a final turn on some regular street, down a perfectly mundane neighborhood, to return to their home and family. I bet they smiled as they were greeted at the door. Their dog welcomed them, their children told them of their day at school, they had a meal, and their spouse shared their bed. 

That's how easy it is to welcome that much evil back home. That button-presser, that family, that nation, that culture, will never wash the sin away. You may think there are no consequences because things appear so normal, but you could never imagine the psychic horror that is seeping out of this house. This is the most haunted place in the world, we should bury it in a sarcophagus of concrete for 10,000 years to seal away the radiation. We won't, and that moral pollution is spreading to all of us. One day every single one of us will have to explain why we killed those 156 people, 120 little girls. I have excuses, but I've been here long enough, breathing in this air, drinking this water, these are my countrymen, and I'm guilty too.

Nobody will write an epic about this button-presser's journey, or direct a blockbuster about it. It is an awful story with no ending.

The Baby Yoda Movie

Star Wars is back in theaters! Disney wants me to call this new movie 'Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu', but I never will. People who use the word "Grogu" are cops, just like Disney Adult influencers who are required to call Star Wars Land its full legal name "Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge". I'm not doing that. We do crimes here. So this is a review of 'The Baby Yoda Movie', starring Baby Yoda. If there are any issues with these decisions, please contact my customer service line. Dial 0 for a live agent.

After a seven year hiatus from cinemas following Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker, it is interesting to see how little hype there seems to be around this movie. Box office followers were certain a month ago that this newest movie would have one of the lowest launches in franchise history. Reports seem to confirm that trend. But box office discussion is as empty and bad faith as the dreaded Dead Game discourse, a meaningless way of discussing a work of art. More substantive are the review scores: 63% at time of writing is technically a pass on Rotten Tomatoes. However, I find critics have been curving the grade for years now to avoid audience backlash. A 63% is probably in reality less than 50%. The audience score at 89% means even the fandom army are not that excited to fight for this one. (Michael, for example, with its hardcore MJ stans, sits at 97%, and that movie has a much worse critic score.) It is hard to say any movie in 2026 will be able to build the kind of excitement that even mid-tier Marvel productions could pull just ten years ago, but The Baby Yoda Movie has gained this reputation online of being a movie nobody is that interested in. That's become the narrative. 

Even I was pretty sure I would hate this, and I was there on Friday night, with a Baby Yoda doll in hand, a dapper Baby Yoda doll wearing a bow tie (see picture). I had people on both sides of me with Baby Yoda dolls. So on second thought, this is one of the only movies this year that feels worthy of being an event. 2026 has been a great year for movies so far, but nobody was making Mother Mary into a big family outting. And The Baby Yoda Movie on that scale feels big, big enough I'm bothering to review it. Even if a lot of the space online feels annoyed and frustrated that they have to deal with Star Wars again.

Luckily, if expectations are low, the ambitions met them. LucasFilm is not out here promoting a Rise of Skywalker or anything, no triumphant return to glory. The Baby Yoda Movie feels like the studio slowly tip-toeing back into theaters with the kinds of movies they wanted to make: small, annual events with low stakes about little corners of the greater Galaxy. The fate of the universe is not threatened. In fact, neither is the major duo listed in the Government Name of this movie. The Baby Yoda Movie is a big episode of the TV Show, The Mandalorian. That's it. It is not the series finale, it's not even a season finale, it is not the most important part of either one of these character's lives. You don't need to have seen any of the Star Wars from before to watch this. And if there's a Baby Yoda 2, don't worry about Baby Yoda 1.

This movie has all the gravitas and drama of Ant-Man 2, possibly the least interesting movie in the entire MCU. It is a couple of adventures on a few planets with a darling little puppet at its center fighting goons with his badass dad. And if you can except a movie that is only that, well... that might not be so bad.