Star Wars Skeleton Crew’s creators relived their childhood dreams of fantastic adventures

Filmmaker Jon Watts grew up “in the middle of nowhere” and, as a kid, for fun, he’d go for a walk in a field and just hoped something exciting would happen, just like in movies such as The Goonies.

“You’d hope you’d find a pirate treasure or be abducted by aliens or something, and it never happened,” he told The Nightly. “But that feeling of being a kid and wanting to go on an adventure was really well captured by those movies, and we’re trying to get back to that feeling.”

The “we” is Watts and his frequent creative partner Christopher Ford who have created Skeleton Crew, an eight-episode streaming series set in the Star Wars universe. The show has been described by its makers as having been inspired by The Goonies and all those childhood favourites where kids embark on an unexpected adventure.

Here, it’s four tykes – dreamer Wim (Ravi Cabot-Conyers), confident Fern (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), engineering prodigy KB (Kyriana Kratter) and the sweet and loyal elephant-like alien Neel (voice of Robert Timothy Smith) – who come across an abandoned rocket ship on their isolated planet and accidentally take off into space.

In a bid to get home, they come across all manner of characters, including Jude Law’s Jod Na Nawood, a suspicious Force user, and a malfunctioning droid named SM33 (voice of Nick Frost).

Skeleton Crew is fun and riotous, brimming with charm and, at times, a little scary.

“Kids who are eight years old want to be a little bit freaked out, they’re interested in that,” Ford said. “Kids always want to know about the scary parts of life, and it’s the grown-ups who are saying, ‘Oh, maybe you’re not quite ready yet’. But we want it to be aspirational in that way.”

The ethos behind the multi-generational Skeleton Crew, according to Ford, is that adults will be able to connect to the show because their inner child is still longing for that pirate treasure adventure, and kids will just recognise it as their current dreams.

Watts added, “We always strove to take the (kid characters) seriously and tell the story on their level and from their experience. In that way, we never thought of it as a kids’ show, it’s a grown-up show that just happens to have four kids in the lead”.

Stepping into the Star Wars universe is a complex thing. You’re wrestling with a long legacy and a passionate and opinionated fandom, including your own relationship to your childhood memories.

Watts and Ford have experience working within an existing franchise – the two wrote the screenplay to Spider-Man: Homecoming and Watts would go on to direct the next two instalments of the Tom Holland-led trilogy, Far From Home and No Way Home.

But Watts contends it was different, “Spider-Man is an established character so you’re already telling a story that people have told before. This one is a world that’s been established, but a story that we’ve made up on our own, and characters that we’ve created, so it’s kind of a different push and pull for us.”

Then there’s the fact that he and Ford were both Star Wars kids. Making the show was a series of moments of them realising what their younger self had already imagined.

“The example that jumps out the most was the kids’ bikes, because when (I was a child), I would ride my bike around and pretend it was speedster and now we’re making them!”

Watts added, “I had lived this, this was my dream, my 10-year-old self’s dream had come true.”

During production, whenever they could, Watts and Ford would both climb onto those speedster bikes or into a X-Wing cockpit and press all the buttons and just play-act.

The enthusiasm to be in your corner of the Star Wars universe must have been contagious because the team was able to convince, without much effort, a bunch of directors with a lot of heat to come and join them.

The list, which Watts calls his favourite people who are working right now, is eye-popping. It included David Lowery (The Green Knight, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints), Jake Schreier (Beef, upcoming Thunderbolts*), Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (Everything Everyone All At Once), Lee Isaac Chung (Minari and Twisters) and Bryce Dallas Howard (The Mandalorian).

Still, even with Watts and Ford’s own love for the world and the talent involved, elements of the Star Wars fandom haven’t always been reasonable. When they haven’t liked something, they have made it very well known. Star Wars actors of non-white backgrounds have been the target of vicious bullying and trolling.

Skeleton Crew’s young cast are diverse, and Watts hopes that “people aren’t going to say negative things about the kids, and if they do, that’s just totally not OK”.

Ford laid it down for any fans who might have objections, “Say it about us, (not the kids).”

They know that when you play with Star Wars characters, it’s the deal you strike. Watts said, “You have no choice, if you want to tell a Star Wars story, Star Wars people are going to talk about it, so we’re just trying to be the biggest fans that we can be and hope that people like it.”

Star Wars: Skeleton Crew is streaming on Disney+ from December 3