Skeleton Crew Creators Break Down That Bizarre Star Wars Holiday Special Callback

While Star Wars: Skeleton Crew doesn’t have a ton of ties to other films and shows from the franchise, there was one major Easter egg in the series premiere that tied back to the most controversial chapter in Star Wars history. Early in the premiere, which hit Disney+ on Monday night, fans noticed that Neel’s family was watching a hologram of the same bizarre space circus that Chewbacca’s son, Lumpy, watched in 1978’s infamous Star Wars Holiday Special.

The reference to the widely panned Holiday Special was easily recognizable to longtime Star Wars fans, and it probably resulted in more than a few laughs during the episode. During an interview with EW, Skeleton Crew creators Jon Watts and Christopher Ford opened up about the inclusion of the hologram, and why they wanted to include it.

“That is easily one of my favorite parts of the whole show,” Watts said. “And I’m glad that it’s in the first episode just so we can get it out of the way. I’ve just always been fascinated by that weird little circus hologram.”

Watts and Ford went on to confirm that the circus footage they used in Skeleton Crew was not the same footage from the Holiday Special, but rather a recreation by the show’s team.

“We recreated it. We initially wanted to see if we could get the original footage, but it’s so low resolution because it was a TV special,” Watts explained.

“It was limiting because we would have to have used the same angle,” added Ford. “We needed to shoot it from multiple angles.”

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Watts, who also directed the first episode of Skeleton Crew, told EW that the team did everything they could to stay as faithful to the original Holiday Special hologram as possible, even though it was a recreation.

“We went into the archives and got all the original wardrobe designs, and the original sketches from the show, and recreated it,” he said. “And our stunt coordinator also happened to be a former Cirque du Soleil performer, so he plays the main dancing guy, and he choreographed a whole new routine based on what is in the Holiday Special.”

In addition to the video itself, the Skeleton Crew music team also had to make a new version of the sounds from the circus hologram, because the Star Wars Holiday Special only exists in poor quality formats.

“The music was another thing that we had to recreate, because it didn’t exist in any form except for on YouTube,” Watts said. “And no one knew what the instruments were or what the orchestration was, so our composer had to recreate that from scratch and rerecord it.”

“We spent a lot of time and effort recreating that so much, just for that one little visual gag,” he continued. “But it makes me really happy, and it makes me wonder what that circus troop is up to.”

New episodes of Star Wars: Skeleton Crew arrive Monday nights on Disney+.