Star Wars: Skeleton Crew Creator Previews "All-Ages" Amblin Adventure
The Mandalorian is a pulpy space western. Andor is a gritty spy thriller. Ahsoka and The Acolyte are steeped in the ways of Force. And Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, another new series set within the Mandalorian timeline, is best described as The Goonies in space. Lucasfilm president and producer Kathleen Kennedy previously told ComicBook that series co-creators Jon Watts (Spider-Man: No Way Home) and Chris Ford (Spider-Man: Homecoming) pitched the coming-of-age adventure as "Goonies in Star Wars," with the tone of an Amblin movie: the production company co-founded by Kennedy and Steven Spielberg, behind such seminal films as E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Gremlins, Back to the Future, and Jurassic Park.
Even the premise, as told by Watts, is Spielbergian: Skeleton Crew is "a story about a group of kids, about 10 years old, from a tiny little planet who accidentally get lost in the Star Wars galaxy. And it's the story of their journey trying to find their way home."
"Skeleton Crew's tone is an adventure," Ford told EW. "We wanted it to be a lot of fun. But of course, along with adventure comes the downside of it, which is danger. And when the kids are in danger, it's extra fraught. So we played with that, but overall we wanted it to be just a fun adventure."
Despite the younger cast of galaxy-faring characters played by Ravi Cabot-Conyers, Kyriana Kratter, Robert Timothy Smith, and Ryan Kiera Armstrong, Skeleton Crew is "for all ages," Ford said. "When we told Kathy Kennedy about that we wanted to go for that Amblin tone, which she perfected over the years, what she would say is that they never thought of those as movies for kids. They just happen to be about kids, a story of a kid going on an adventure. So it could be for anyone."
Whether it's single mom Mary Taylor in E.T. or the bumbling bad guy grown-ups in Goonies, there will, of course, be an adult presence in the form of Jude Law's mysterious Force-sensitive character.
"He is someone the children meet on their attempt to get home. He is like a lot of the world that they experience: contradictory, and at times a place of nurture and other times a place of threat," Law teased. "Because it's through [the children's] eyes, at times there's a sort of goofy nature and a goofy relationship between the kids and the adults. And then other times it's really quite dark and quite scary, which I guess is what the world probably looks like to an awful lot of 11-year-olds."
Star Wars: Skeleton Crew is slated to premiere later this year on Disney+.