[COLUMN] The Hand-Me-Down Nostalgia of Skeleton Crew | by Darren Mooney

Note: This article contains very loose spoilers for the first two episodes of Skeleton Crew, the new Star Wars show streaming on Disney+. It’s charming, if a little light and sluggish. If you want to go in completely unspoiled, feel free to bookmark and come back.

The latest Star Wars streaming show, Skeleton Crew, premiered this week from Jon Watts and his frequent collaborator Christopher Ford.

The series is interesting, because it feels like the first of the live action Star Wars spin-off streaming shows to be aimed specifically at children. Of course, George Lucas has argued that Star Wars was always “a kid’s movie for 12-year-olds” and even the grittiest entries in the franchise, like Andor, are still accessible for children. Still, Skeleton Crew stands out as the first of these streaming shows that seems to have been created specifically for a younger audience.

This is reflected in the show’s cast and premise. The four leads - Wim (Ravi Cabot-Conyers), Fern (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), KB (Kyriana Kratter) and Neel (Robert Timothy Smith) – are children who stumble onto a spaceship and find themselves embroiled in an great adventure very consciously drawing from Treasure Island. Along the way, they meet pirate captain Silvo (Jude Law) and the first mate droid SM-33 (Nick Frost), very obvious allusions to the Robert Louis Stevenson classic. It’s undeniably charming.

This pivot towards a younger audience is necessary for a long-running franchise like Star Wars. One of the bigger issues facing Disney’s iconic brands is the sense that the target audience is effectively ageing out of the movie-going and show-watching demographic. Under Disney’s stewardship, these properties have become nostalgia machines, largely pandering to the memories of fans who are no longer in the age bracket that regularly goes to theatres or watches franchise media on streaming.

In the past, these sorts of franchises would effectively refresh their fanbases by going dormant for a while between iterations. Star Trek was off the air for nearly two decades before the launch of Star Trek: The Next Generation, giving the new show the breathing room to attract a new audience. In Star Wars fandom, the long gap between the original trilogy and the prequels meant that the prequels essentially got to belong to a completely different generation of fans.

It is harder to do that when these sorts of franchises are “always on.” It is impossible to have a clean break like that in an era where studios will keep churning out new Star Wars films and shows until the heat death of the universe. One of the big tensions within the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been the reluctance to hand over the property to a new generation, to the point of announcing the return of Robert Downey Jr. to the franchise just half a decade after killing him off.

In such a climate, projects like Star Trek: Prodigy or Ms. Marvel or Skeleton Crew make sense as “induction” courses, an “on ramp” to welcome younger viewers into the larger franchise eco-sphere. It’s a time-tested strategy, one as cynical as it is effective: “get ’em while they’re young.” This may also be why these younger characters tend to be framed as fans of the franchise. In Skeleton Crew, Wim is obsessed with Jedi lore and is shown reading about their history and mythology.

However, there is an interesting tension in Skeleton Crew, in that it feels at times like a 40-year-old man’s idea of what a children’s show version of Star Wars should look like. The reductive way of framing this would be “Star Wars meets Stranger Things”, but is indicative of a larger trend. While Stranger Things feels like a very obvious and heavy influence on Skeleton Crew, it also feels somewhat unfair to Watts and Ford.

Skeleton Crew feels very heavily influenced by the children’s movies of the 1980s. There are a number of very direct antecedents, the unlikely adventure of The Goonies or the strange space craft from Flight of the Navigator, but it is also something of a broader vibe that feels of a piece with movies like E.T., The Karate Kid, Stand by Me, Back to the Future and even Labyrinth. The show takes several of its visual and narrative cues from these stories of latchkey kids exploring the world, and seems almost laser-guided to hone into nostalgia for those sorts of films.

The opening episode of Skeleton Crew is largely set on At Attin, a world that seems largely disconnected from the larger galaxy and which exists (perhaps literally) out of time. The Star Wars universe is populated by single biome planets, with Tatooine being a desert world and Endor having a forest moon, so Skeleton Crew frames At Attin as Planet Suburbia. It’s probably only a short hop to the “mallworld” from William Gibson’s pitch for Alien 3.

Like many protagonists from these 1980s films, Wim and Fern have been raised by single parents who are too busy with work to meaningfully engage with their children. Wendle (Tunde Adebimpe) is too busy attending meetings and struggling to hit deadlines to pay any attention to what is going on with Wim, while Fara (Kerry Condon) is giving grand speeches about “the Great Work” while remaining oblivious to Fern’s extra-curricular activities.

This throwback sensibility makes sense in the context of Watts’ larger filmography. His directorial debut, Cop Car, was a variation on this template, the story of a pair of 10-year-olds (James Freedson-Jackson and Hays Wellford) who steal a patrol car, not realizing that there is body in the trunk, which leads to them being chased by corrupt Sheriff Kretzer (Kevin Bacon). Watts’ followed this with Spider-Man: Homecoming, a high school superhero movie obviously indebted to John Hughes.

Indeed, it’s possible to understand Skeleton Crew as part of a larger trend in popular culture, undoubtedly resulting from the massive success of Stranger Things. Netflix has recently produced a slate of family films very consciously evoking the Amblin children’s films of the 1980s, such as Shawn Levy’s The Adam Project and Christopher Landon’s We Have a Ghost. Paramount recently offered its own 1980s animated cash-in with the retro animated Transformers One.

It is perhaps strange that so much modern children’s entertainment is so firmly anchored in not just the period setting but also the broader cultural aesthetic of the 1980s. Then again, nostalgia is nothing new. During the 1980s, a surprising amount of family entertainment was anchored in the late 1940s and into the 1950s: literally in films like Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Stand by Me, but more broadly in the aesthetics of movies like E.T. or Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

However, while those films might have been set during or reminded viewers of the 1950s, they were very firmly anchored in their moment. It would have been impossible, for example, to imagine a 1950s studio comedy in which the lead character is a teenager who travels back in time and has to avoid having sex with his mother, set to a soundtrack by Huey Lewis and the News. Had E.T. been made in the 1950s, the kids would most likely have killed the eponymous alien with hammers.

There is a difference between updating classic templates and aesthetics for the modern era and just recycling them. Even the wave of 1980s horror movies based on 1950s classics were radically different in their effects, their tone, their themes. Nobody was going to confuse John Carpenter’s The Thing with Howard Hawks’ The Thing from Another World. David Cronenberg’s The Fly was a very different project than Kurt Neumann’s original. They were also aimed at an older audience.

Indeed, it might be reasonable to argue that George Lucas’ original vision of Star Wars was rooted in nostalgia for the war movies and adventure serials that he loved as a child, but those films updated the visual and cinematic language of those old-fashioned adventures for the modern age. Star Wars might have taken its cues from Dambusters, Flash Gordon and The Hidden Fortress, but when it premiered in 1977, it looked utterly unlike anything that audiences had ever seen before.

In contrast, allowing for advances in special effects, Skeleton Crew feels like it could have been released during the 1980s. As with so much modern Star Wars, the show is permeated with nostalgia. Even within the relatively fresh-for-the-franchise framework of a show about kids escaping from suburbia into a pirate adventure, Skeleton Crew starts with an overt homage to the opening of the original Star Wars, a corridor firefight as a smaller vessel is overtaken by marauders.

It is strange to see a series that is ostensibly about attracting a new generation of Star Wars fans lean so heavily on nostalgia for the childhood entertainment of older fans. However, it’s easy to understand the logic at play here. After all, those kids aren’t the ones paying for the household’s Disney+ subscription. From Disney’s perspective, it is perhaps more important that Skeleton Key look like what a parent assumes a kid’s show should look like than that it actually be a kid’s show.

After all, there is a lingering question here: what does modern children’s entertainment look like, if it doesn’t look like those beloved classics of the 1980s? Modern kids seem more likely to be watching YouTube than television or even streaming. For a lot of children, once they move past what their parents force them to watch, contemporary media looks more like Skibidi Toilet or Battle for Dream Island than E.T. or The Goonies. It’s very hard to construct media that can compete with that.

Faced with that reality, it makes sense (and fits with Disney’s approach to the Star Wars brand) to retreat into what has already been proven to work. However, there is also a sense that the wave of 1980s nostalgia that crystalized with Stranger Things might be past its sell-by date. The Netflix show launched over eight years ago, back in 2016. It will wrap up with its final season next year. Has the 1980s nostalgia boom produced a comparable hit for younger audiences in the past eight years?

Allowing for all of that, what alternatives are there? How else could Disney hope to produce a version of Star Wars that might appeal to younger viewers? Given the popularity of anime with younger audiences, Disney might have more success reaching those viewers where they are by expanding out some of the Visions animations. Of course, that would mean pushing the franchise a little outside of its comfort zone, particularly for older and more traditional fans.

There is a strange sense watching Skeleton Crew that the best young fans can hope for is hand-me-down nostalgia. When Star Wars premiered, the franchise was considered revolutionary for its “used future” aesthetic. Watching Skeleton Crew, it occasionally feels like all the franchise has to offer new audiences is a used past.