15/11
Featured in AniMat's Crazy Cartoon Cast: Silly Old Deadly Bear (2022)
Story
Four kids make a mysterious discovery on their home planet that leads them to get lost in a strange and dangerous galaxy.. Jude Law in "Skeleton Crew" plus more stars from a galaxy far, far away.. The holographic circus that is entertaining Neel’s young siblings is the same one Chewbacca’s family watch in the infamous The Star Wars Holiday Special (1978).. I can imagine how the initial pitch went like: "It'll be like The Goonies but in the Star Wars universe!
Think of how Super 8 worked – a Spielberg-ish childhood fantasy!
We’ll take the angle of kids to look into the concept, while making it interesting via elements from The Treasure Island with a visual touch of Pirates of the Caribbean. "So much effort, so many visual details and trivia, yet, you can get bored along the way. Because Star Wars stuff is no longer being "created". It’s simply being "generated" the way AI generates images.
I don’t feel like glorifying or trashing it
I’ll be glad if this one manages to attract today’s kids into the original Star Wars stories but if the question at hand is whether adults would be on board this pirate ship, not so sure here. The Mandalorian rocks as the unique SW series that had gravitas of sorts, leaning more towards Sergio Leone westerns than to cheaper space operas. The Acolyte was a betrayal to SW at the very least. Skeleton Crew is, well, neither so bright nor so demented.
It was wrong
But I do have some resentment with Disney’s treatment of SW… They never even tried to respect and explore the essence of the concept… Rather, they turned it into a "setting" for whatever series they felt like doing. SW is, in and of itself, a dynamic network of valuable ideas and stories to communicate.
What Disney+ had been doing is to utilize it for external agendas, concerns and pushes
Anyways… Unlike The Acolyte, Skeleton Crew is at the very least not toxic – so far. (And I’m waiting for the great explanation to why a Jedi would need to wait for some kids to be thrown in his jail cell in order to perform his most simple trick and make the key come to him!). Freshen up your Watchlist with the latest roster of streaming movies and TV shows coming to Disney+, featuring old favorites and top-notch newcomers.