Star Wars: Skeleton Crew Almost Cast Goonies as Adults (and That Makes Sense)

Star Wars: Skeleton Crew is ready to take viewers to a new corner of the Star Wars universe. The show focuses on four children going on an adventure after a discovery on their homeworld, a story that is akin to the classic kids movies made by Amblin Entertainment. Showrunners Jon Watts and Chistopher Ford haven’t been shy about their inspirations for the series, speaking in multiple interviews about the kind of feeling they wanted from the show. In an interview with ComicBook, Watts and Ford talked about their feeling of working on Star Wars, being starstruck by meeting the accomplished members of the crew, and the influence of The Goonies on the show. They also talked about maybe casting the grown members of the cast of The Goonies as adults, which makes a lot of sense for the show.

Watts said when asked about if these cameos were planned, “We had talked about that as an overall casting idea potentially, where it’s like, should we find some kids that were in those movies and now cast them as some adult characters? But it wasn’t enough to really carry through. But no, there’s definitely an opportunity there.”

Skeleton Crew taking direction from the classic kids films of the 1980s is a step in a new direction. It makes the show unique among Star Wars projects, and not having appearances from adult cast from the Amblin movies is a missed opportunity. Movies like The Goonies and E.T. thrust children into situations that showed that the world was quite different from what they were used to. The actors in these films have an iconic place in the childhoods of multiple generations — even though they were made in the 1980s, they’ve proven timeless. While they wouldn’t be playing the same characters in Skeleton Crew, having them there would draw a throughline to those classic stories.

Skeleton Crew is aiming to be like those classic films for a new generation. The young cast of Skeleton Crew watched those films at the behest of Watts and Ford. The similarities between Skeleton Crew and these films is undeniable, as all them see children leaving the familiar to learn lessons about the world around them, and their place in the bigger reality they discover. Getting to see someone like Sean Astin, Jeff Cohen, Ke Huy Quan, Martha Plimpton, or any of the others would have made the similarities more obvious, but Skeleton Crew seems to be in good hands on that count.

Star Wars: Skeleton Crew premieres December 3rd on Disney+.