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This article appears in the new issue of DEN OF GEEK magazine. You can read all of our magazine stories here.
At one point in the first episode of Skeleton Crew, young Wim (Ravi Cabot-Conyers) encounters a barrier with his speeder bike, and so has to get off the bike and haul it up with his hands. Sure, this is a fictional ride with anti-gravity of some kind, but even this bike has its limits. Any latchkey kid from the ’80s or ’90s can relate, which is the brilliance of the newest Disney+ Star Wars series; it makes you feel like a kid again. Lucky for Wim and three other galactic kiddos—certified mean girl Fern (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), pseudo-cyborg KB (Kyriana Kratter), and blue elephant alien Neel (Robert Timothy Smith)—their mode of transport gets a serious upgrade by the end of the first episode. Hint: Did you ever dream of finding a wrecked starship in your backyard?
“As a kid, you’d just go off on an adventure and just hope that you’d end up in Star Wars somehow,” Skeleton Crew co-creator Jon Watts tells Den of Geek magazine. “That’s all I did growing up.”
Because the opening episode of Skeleton Crew leans heavily on the trope of kids encountering something weird in a field (Stephen King is smiling somewhere), it’s tempting to think of the show as the in-universe Star Wars answer to the first season of Stranger Things. But, it turns out, that’s just the setup. Skeleton Crew is playing a longer game. On the surface, the new series looks like a sweet coming-of-age story that just happens to be set inside of the Star Wars galaxy. But, in truth, it’s a narrative chimera: part-pirate story, part-space opera, and best of all, a fantasy mystery that feels like a beautiful mash-up of a beat-up paperback fantasy novel and a slick ’80s movie best enjoyed with a heavy dose of Twizzlers and Reese’s Pieces.
“If we’re talking about ’80s movies, I feel like every single one of them is somehow the inspiration,” Watts says of the ’80s vibe in Skeleton Crew. “We were so immersed in that world that you can’t help it. We’re never consciously referencing any of that stuff. It just is part of our DNA.”
Best known to genre fans as the director of the last three Spider-Man films for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Watts clearly gets what makes a geek heart beat faster but also what simply makes good stories work. Along with Christopher Ford—the screenwriter on Spider-Man: Homecoming—the pair aimed to do what anyone tries to do with a new Star Wars project these days: make it seem different, yet familiar.
Haters have been moaning for years now that new Star Wars products either rely too much on nostalgia or, paradoxically, don’t have enough respect for the original movies. Skeleton Crew smartly sidesteps much of these conversations simply because a ton of its nostalgia fuel doesn’t come from obvious sources.
For the Love of Adventure
While some of the early press around Skeleton Crew has focused on the movie being a Goonies-style adventure set in the faraway Star Wars galaxy, Ford is quick to point out that some deeper cuts, like the 1985 film Explorers, were equally influential on Skeleton Crew, and that’s because of the pure love of the fantasy they tried to craft. In short, the demographic for Skeleton Crew is, in their minds, themselves.
“We didn’t go into this trying to write an AI prompt of combining cool things,” Ford says. “We just were trying to write a good story, and these are the things that have been drummed into our imaginations.”
Among their cinematic influences for Skeleton Crew, Watts and Ford cite various films produced by Amblin in the ’80s—the studio most famous for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, but perhaps more relevantly, The Goonies, Gremlins, and Young Sherlock Holmes. But just because the show focuses on children, that doesn’t mean the stakes are low. If anything, the innocence and naiveté of the kids make the tension even greater. In the second episode, when the gang finds itself on what can only be described as a pirate spaceport, you’re genuinely concerned that something horrible is going to happen.
“You’re still going to get the jeopardy,” series star Jude Law explains. “Which Jon turns way up; he makes the threat very real. In this show, life and death mean life and death. But you still have the innocence.”
Reaching Deep Into the Star Wars Toy Box
Hardcore Star Wars fans know a lot about characters glimpsed in the background, and in many ways, Skeleton Crew is a show built on that subculture within fandom.
In the 1990s, there were short story anthologies like Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina and Tales from Jabba’s Palace, which tell stories about the many characters who exist in the periphery of the film saga. Accordingly, stepping into Skeleton Crew is like stepping into a rich, live-action version of those ’90s books and comics. In the first episode, one of the first characters we see is the pirate Brutus (Fred Tatasciore), a menacing Shistavanen—better known as a “wolfman” alien—first glimpsed in the theatrical cut of Star Wars, chilling at the bar, looking scary as hell.
“We’re interested in these kinds of characters because our heroes, these kids, aren’t going to blow up the Death Star,” Ford says. “But we wanted our story to be steeped in that world, and that’s why we have those deep cuts.”
These details aren’t just there for the sake of being dorky Easter eggs. Skeleton Crew has a method to its madness. For one thing, The Mandalorian has just spent the past five years establishing a very dangerous and detailed post-Return of the Jedi underworld, and Skeleton Crew is set in that same continuity and at that same point in the timeline.
In fact, Mando stans will recognize the hench-pirate known as Vane (Marti Matulis)—a character who previously appeared in The Mandalorian. “Vane was supposed to die in Mando,” Ford reveals. “But they loved him, and they let him live, and then we took him.”
More than anything, Watts wants to make it clear that Skeleton Crew isn’t looking to distract viewers with massive surprises or references to other Star Wars stories. “I don’t want people to think that there’s going to be some insane cameo in the middle of the show,” he says firmly. And then, Ford adds, “Yeah, not to rule anything out, but Jude isn’t really Palpatine or anything like that.”
A Step Into a Larger World
By the end of the second episode, the kids meet a mysterious adult ally in the form of shadowy Force-user Jod Na Nawood (Jude Law), who may or may not be a Jedi, a former pirate captain, a con artist, or all of the above. As Law points out, the tone of Skeleton Crew will feel decidedly closer to something you can imagine watching with the whole family rather than, say, the more adult grittiness of Andor. And yet, this is still the Star Wars universe, and as Ford insists, the duplicitous character of Jod fits in perfectly with the back-stabbing wretched hives of scum and villainy that comprise a surprisingly large part of the Star Wars mythos.
“Well, Jude’s character could totally be in Andor,” Ford points out, to which Watts adds, “We didn’t want this to feel like a kids’ show. It still has to be an adult world that they’re in.”
Part of the shift in Skeleton Crew comes from a basic point-of-view change. Yes, we happen to be in the same time frame as The Mandalorian, but certain revelations in the show’s first few episodes make it clear that the background of these children and their specific planet creates a unique opportunity to bring characters into the Star Wars galaxy slowly. This isn’t a reboot or a new timeline at all. It’s just the people who are different.
As Obi-Wan Kenobi told Luke in Return of the Jedi, the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view. The fascinating thing about Skeleton Crew is that it truly does shift that point of view in a way that we’ve never quite seen before.
“I think it changes the perspective without changing the world,” Watts explains. “It’s the first time where [Star Wars] is really told through the eyes of four 10-year-old kids. And by doing that, I think it just automatically gives it a new feeling without changing the parts of Star Wars that we already know and love.”
So, you can call Skeleton Crew the Stranger Things version of Star Wars or even “Goonies in Space.” But, the advantage this show has over any of the other new Star Wars shows is that the characters themselves don’t really understand the nuances and intricacies of this complex galaxy. And for that simple reason, by shifting the point-of-view, Skeleton Crew might pull off the impossible and create a truly brand-new Star Wars adventure.
Star Wars: Skeleton Crew hits Disney+ on Monday, Dec. 2 at 9 pm ET.
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