Do I really, honestly regret selling my old Star Wars toys? Yes, every day…but never mind. The process of selling them taught me an important lesson.
When we opened the doors for my family’s moving sale, men in early middle age rushed into the house with the focus of stormtroopers boarding a blockade runner. They silently shoved everything into bags, ready to pay whatever we were asking. One had camped out overnight.
My first thought was, I underpriced everything. My second thought was, I’m glad that’s not me. I’m glad I can let go.
Skeleton Crew, the new Star Wars show from Jon Watts and Christopher Ford (best known for the Tom Holland Spider-Man trilogy), is a self-conscious attempt to recapture the sense of fun and excitement with which kids my age greeted the first Star Wars movies. Think The Goonies in space, and if you think, hang on, they already did that and it was called Explorers, you’re going to appreciate this show.
Today’s kids may or may not appreciate the more meta aspects of a show in which kids within the Star Wars universe play with Star Wars action figures — like Henry Thomas did in E.T., a movie that helped create the template for Skeleton Crew and also featured a Yoda cameo of sorts. What kids, and adults, are apt to appreciate is that the new series continues the project of lifting the Biblical weight that’s come incongruously to rest on a franchise originally modeled after Flash Gordon serials.
Ford and Watts have crafted a scenario in which the protagonists are not only four children — one of them an alien, one a cyborg — but in which those kids come from a place where galactic news has failed to penetrate. At one point they miss a reference to the events of the original Star Wars movie, earning a scoff from a more worldly character who didn’t “miss the war.”
The idea is that Skeleton Crew (premiering today on Disney+) is a new point of entry to the Star Wars universe, with characters who haven’t memorized the contents of Wookieepeia. The show’s pace is swift but light, recapturing some of the offhand charm of the original trilogy while keeping a sense of stakes. Citing Steven Spielberg’s Amblin studio as a touchpoint, Watts told Star Wars Insider “they’re grown-up films that just happen to star kids.”
Spielberg also, however, has an unparalleled gift for sketching unforgettable, believable characters. Granted, Star Wars is space opera, but at least in the first three episodes, the four young leads don’t pop into three dimensions as immediately as their ’80s inspirations, or even the protagonists of throwback smash Stranger Things.
The most endearing is Neel (Robert Timothy Smith), an elephantine humanoid who’s an eager, slightly nervous best friend to the adventurous Wim (Ravi Cabot-Conyers). Fern (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) and KB (Kyriana Kratter) could have taken their character templates from a show pitch about young Lando and Lobot, the latter’s cybernetic implants telegraphing the same character traits that have traditionally been assigned to eyeglass wearers.
(Also see: Tech from Star Wars series The Bad Batch and Geordi from Star Trek: The Next Generation. In this case, it’s part of the franchise’s continuing efforts to make amends for the ableist implications of the symbolic limb-slashing in the Lucas era.)
In true Goonies fashion, the kids start out in (space) suburbia and find themselves drawn into the world of (space) pirates. Star Wars has done pirates before, but it’s never been quite this on-the-nose, complete with a peg-leg droid (Nick Frost), space parrots, and scurvy accents. Similarly, speeder bikes now have streamers on their handlebars and provide rides just as bumpy as the BMX two-wheelers from E.T.
In other words, Ford and Watts are not trying to impress anyone with their originality, and there’s something undeniably refreshing about that. It remains to be seen whether fans reward the approach with the viewership numbers that eluded recent live-action series The Acolyte, a think-outside-the-box saga from the High Republic era that was cancelled after a single season — to the chagrin of fans hoping for more diversity of all sorts in the Star Wars universe.
Those fans may be bummed if Skeleton Crew, in recycling the kids-on-bikes and flashlights-among-the ferns aesthetic for a galaxy far, far away, hits a sweet spot The Acolyte missed. Still, the show’s pleasures are as real as its pirate port (a visual standout) is imaginary. It’s a show you can enjoy with your kids — or, as the case may be, with your parents.
Top photo, by Matt Kennedy: Wim (Ravi Cabot-Conyers), Jod Na Nawood (Jude Law), KB (Kyriana Kratter), Neel (Robert Timothy Smith), and Fern (Ryan Kiera Armstrong). Center photo: a new spaceport. Both ©2024 Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All Rights Reserved.
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