Announcing a Spaceballs sequel recently, Mel Brooks pointed out just how much more Star Wars there is to spoof now — as opposed to at the time Brooks’s first sci-fi satire was released in 1987.
He’s not wrong. In fact, there’s so much Star Wars content now that the franchise even his own official sub-brand for making fun of itself. An entire vertical of Lego Star Wars content both celebrates and pokes gentle fun at goings-on a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
The Lego lens also allows Star Wars to dip into the multiverse trend, which would normally not be a good fit for a franchise that employs the world’s busiest continuity cops. Even Young Jedi Adventures, a show for preschoolers, is considered canon. In the Lego sandbox, though, everything’s up for grabs.
Rebuild the Galaxy, a four-episode show released in 2024, introduced a young nerf-herder named Sig (Stranger Things‘ Gaten Matarazzo) who accidentally scrambles the galaxy and creates a looking-glass Star Wars universe where nothing is what you’d expect. “Darth Jar Jar,” for example, played to a long-running fan in-joke that the bumbling Gungan is actually a Sith lord.
On September 19, a Rebuild the Galaxy sequel series, subtitled Pieces of the Past, drops into the toy bin. There’s no need to rewrite canon this time, because the first show established that Sig’s scramble cannot be undone. Rebuild the Galaxy is now simply an alternate Star Wars universe.
Fans of the first series will be glad for more silly fun in the same vein, and the show looks fantastic: director Chris Buckley and his animation team have created a series of stirring settings for their mini-figs to explore.
Still, the new series really rides on the assumption that viewers are invested in the stories of Sig and his pals. There’s a new villain named Solitus (Dan Stevens) — a generic dark Force user in the vein of Snoke — and much of the plot revolves around Sig’s relationship with his brother (Tony Revolori).
This is a kids’ show, and on that basis it’s…fine. Older fans are meant to enjoy the riffs on the franchise’s voluminous lore, and with the easy gags off the table (the first series ended with the reveal of “the Landolorian”), showrunners Dan Hernandez and Benji Samit delight in making even more obscure references.
Are you familiar with, for example, the anthropomorphic rabbit species known as Lepi? It’s understandable if not. The character Jaxxom (Ben Schwartz), who originated in a 1977 comic book, acknowledges as much onscreen: “I’m a deep cut!”
If Rebuild the Galaxy is starting to take its own alternate canon a bit seriously, well, that’s only in keeping with the sprit of the overarching franchise. It’s hard not to like the Lego universe’s happy-go-lucky spirit, and no one seems to be enjoying themselves more than the veteran actors who return to their classic characters.
Billy Dee Williams framed his recent autobiography as stories he might be telling at a patio table over a bottle of wine, and the Landolorian sounds like all his dialogue was recorded in the same setting. You can just hear the 88-year-old actor’s delight at the fact that his journey of half a century has led to this moment, voicing a twisted toy version of Lando who quips, “The baby’s name is Grogu, baby!”
Image: Sig (voiced by Gaten Matarazzo) in Lego Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy (2024). Courtesy Lucasfilm Ltd.
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