Star Wars: Skeleton Crew: This Could Be a Real Adventure
December 2, 2024 7:03 PM - Season 1, Episode 1 - Subscribe

Kids from an ordinary planet discover a surprising secret.
posted by 1970s Antihero (17 comments total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
I think that most people will agree that Star Wars is only good when it's smearing a thin layer of Star Wars over something else that is already good.

Jidaigeki plus Star Wars
The Dam Busters plus Star Wars
The Hidden Fortress plus Star Wars
Ben Hur plus Star Wars
Lone Wolf and Cub plus Star Wars
The Battle of Algiers plus Star Wars

Star Wars tends to have problems mostly when they try to layer Star Wars on top of itself; Star Wars plus Star Wars is a snake eating its own tale (if you'll pardon the pun). The prequels suffered from this and the sequels were even worse on this front even if they were better than the prequels on basically every other level.

At least for the first episode of this series I have to say that The Goonies plus Star Wars is really working for me.
posted by Parasite Unseen at 8:51 AM on December 3, 2024 [8 favorites]


I don't know what it was about this first episode, but it felt slightly off. Maybe it was the suburban setting, which I don't mind so much as I definitely see it as something akin to a authoritarian utopian approach placed on the people within it. There's a security force of droids tasked with maintaining its aspects, students are expected to conform and become integral parts of society at an early age and so on. Maybe the kid actors just didn't have an opportunity to make themselves come across as interesting outside of Fern.

The Goonies power was big in this one, right down to the score with the individual notes indicating a mystery.

The opening sequence of the pirate attack was pretty great and about as close as you can get to pirates swinging from the yard arms across the gulf between ships onto the opposing deck as you can get. Maybe it was the pacing change from that opener to the quietness of Wim's life. I didn't find the elephant kid super intriguing in this episode, and I guess, Wim neither. The girl with the visor just kept on giving me the vibes from PBS Kids Odd Squad (live action sci-fi tv show) and it was soooo distracting. I think if they hadn't given her white hair it would have worked better. The actress was also more compelling when she had her visor up, which wasn't nearly enough.

BUT, things changed when we got to the second episode. So I'll pick that up in the accompanying post!

Overall, a decent opening and definitely a good choice to drop episodes 1 and 2 together for a much better balanced introduction to the show.
posted by Atreides at 2:11 PM on December 3, 2024


*sigh* Look, I know that it's fun to play "let's find the pop culture reference to compare this pop culture thing to"; I do it all the time. Big bonus points if it's relatively obscure! ("See, The Goonies is really just Bertrand Brinley's The Mad Scientists' Club with Spielberg slathered all over it." (Which it kind of is, but anyway.)) But reducing it to "it's bad if it refers back to previous installments" really doesn't work. The Clone Wars was much more enjoyable than the prequels that it was based off of because Dave Filoni is a much better creator than George Lucas working without his ex-wife; she's the one that won the Oscar, after all. The Last Jedi was better than the movies that bookended it because Rian Johnson is better on an off day than J.J. Abrams ever was. That's how it works.

Anyway. This was much better than The Goonies, although I will acknowledge that I may have been at least ten years too old to get into that movie; I did very much like the similarly-themed (and more science-fictiony) Explorers that came out around the same time, as well as Stranger Things, which may have had more to do with this being made. I also liked very much that, even though the New Republic is in place, there is a very authoritarian vibe to the whole school-industrial complex, with their test which puts you on a track for the rest of your life. (It also syncs up well with the reform program for the ex-Imperials in The Mandalorian, which isn't above a little mind control if they think it's needed.) They're so steeped in it that they can't see how little things seem to have changed since the days of the creepy old man in his Murder Moon. I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that DelinquentCatcherBot 5000 comes after them like some clanky Javert.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:32 PM on December 3, 2024 [8 favorites]


Also, too, I ran across this comment in an old thread on the blue (about a Danny Lavery piece regarding the Boxcar Children) that gets to "the great dilemma of children's literature [being] the line between something being dangerous in a romantic and exciting way, and something being dangerous in a scary and tragic way."
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:23 PM on December 3, 2024 [2 favorites]


The nightmarishly bland suburban hellscape planet that the kids all live on made me wish a Death Star would show up and blow it the fuck to smithereens. I'm glad they left it behind, and I hope they never go back. That was awful!
posted by surlyben at 11:01 PM on December 3, 2024 [1 favorite]


I also thought of Explorers! That was on some cable channel wayyyy too often back in the day.

The Suburbs of Star Wars was the most strikingly unexpected thing I've seen from this franchise since maybe the prison in Andor.
posted by CheesesOfBrazil at 6:43 AM on December 4, 2024 [6 favorites]


There was something delightfully disquieting about the suburban streets where everything is on rails. It was such a spot-on visual metaphor for the path those kids are on when the episode starts. I’ll say that I wouldn’t have minded if this episode was about 15 minutes shorter, but I understand the storytelling impulse to establish the home of the main quartet of kids, so there will be some place they can’t ever go back to, metaphorically or literally.

I’m watching this with my son, and his engagement flagged a bit around the middle, but on the whole he liked it. Hopefully tomorrow we can watch the second episode.
posted by Kattullus at 9:41 AM on December 4, 2024 [2 favorites]


The Suburbs of Star Wars was the most strikingly unexpected thing I've seen from this franchise since maybe the prison in Andor.

Not all prisons have bars, I like this comparison.
posted by Atreides at 10:33 AM on December 4, 2024 [2 favorites]


everything is on rails

Another way of looking at it is that everything is tethered to the ground.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 10:41 AM on December 4, 2024 [6 favorites]


But yeah, I don't necessarily _mind_ Jedi powers or even midichlorians in my space fantasy, but when the big ol' galaxy, far away as it may be, boils down to the same ol' Skywalker clan doing Skywalker stuff, ech. But, like, day to day weirdness in that galaxy and people living their lives and having adventures in it? More of that, please.
posted by Kyol at 11:15 AM on December 4, 2024 [7 favorites]


I think that if you’re going to tell a new story in an existing universe, you have to have a point. And while that point can be explicitly thematic—Andor deploying the Empire’s iconography to show how brutal this regime actually is, or Lower Decks picking at the seams of Star Trek, or Johnson using Last Jedi to interrogate what we actually want when we go back to these old universes—sometimes it can be as simple as Strange New Worlds wanting to show what the planet-of-the-week story engine can do with a modern budget and technology.

These shows fail when they’re just about gap filling, or just about “more” content in the same universe, which is a trap that a lot of the Disney+ shows fall into. It’s also why House of the Dragon and various Dune prequels don’t hold a lot of appeal for me. I’m not opposed to prequels, but the point of the prequel can’t just be setting up the board for the original thing; it needs to have its own reason for being told. Resonance and connection are fine, but the tighter you tie your story to what came before the harder it is to make this story satisfying in its own right.

So while I think “Star Wars + Goonies” is one way to look at this, the point is more along the lines of “let’s tell a fun adventure story for kids.” And that hopefully also frees the writers from tying things back to the other stories in a thousand different ways, because kids won’t have seen all of this different stuff. And that improves the odds that this will be a fun and satisfying show instead of just more show.
posted by thecaddy at 5:03 AM on December 5, 2024 [10 favorites]


PREACH, thecaddy. That is precisely my problem with Ahsoka. It's just a lengthy trailer for Upcoming Thrawn Project.
posted by CheesesOfBrazil at 6:07 AM on December 5, 2024


Ahsoka did have a small subtitle, The Search for Jabba the Hutt.
posted by Atreides at 8:34 AM on December 5, 2024 [2 favorites]


what was that currency manipulation spiel all about? is the great work some kind of crypto scam?
posted by eustatic at 8:44 PM on December 6, 2024


TBH, I'd have to watch it a third time to try and figure it out.
posted by Atreides at 7:28 AM on December 9, 2024


We tried this the other night. My partner was a bit taken aback by the violence at the beginning in the pirate scenes. It was a very different show after that. I hope that the bland horror of Star Wars suburbs is intentional. I'm not convinced though.

Neither of us ever really "got" The Goonies, so our mild level of enthusiasm might be due to that. Not entirely sure if we'll get around to more.
posted by idb at 2:58 PM on January 6


Goonies' homage or not, it needs to stand on its own legs. I never got into JJ Abrams Super 8 because I felt he was trying way too hard to replicate an Amblin film and didn't focus as much as he might on something more independent. I do think the bland horror is intended, fwiw, and would recommend sticking through Episode three. If you're not convinced by then, then check out and move on.
posted by Atreides at 5:30 PM on January 6 [1 favorite]


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