Main cast: Jude Law (Jod Na Nawood), Ravi Cabot-Conyers (Wim), Ryan Kiera Armstrong (Fern), Kyriana Kratter (KB), Robert Timothy Smith (Neel), Tunde Adebimpe (Wendle), and Kerry Condon (Fara)
Director: Jon Watts
Eeuw, here is another one of the interminable Disney+ Star Wars shows that keep coming out from the assembly line, despite the fact that each show gets fewer and fewer people bothering to tune in. Still, Star Wars: Skeleton Crew is brought by the same guy that did the recent Spider-Man movies, so what can go wrong, right?
Well, how about the gang of assembled shills on YouTube, Twitch, and X drawing fan art of that kid alien in the bath and openly gagging about how they hope he and that female alien would get their inhuman freak on?
We are talking about adults with pronouns, dyed hair, and the resilience of tumbleweeds in a storm when it comes to criticisms… openly drooling over the notion of kid aliens doing that. If these people were the folks that the marketing people of Disney are counting on to spread the love of the show around, I’d suspect that the target audience must be furry PDF files.
Then again, the Disney-owned Lucasfilm is doing what is the first principle in the playbook of that slice of society anyway: they are bringing it to the kids. That’s right, this is a kiddie show, although it panders so hard by making “homage” and “tribute” to classics of the 1980s like The Goonies that only adults in their 40s and older would get.
I suppose in this aspect, the show is honest: let’s be real, not many kids would watch this show because anything put out by Disney these days is considered not cool at all. It doesn’t help at all that the shills all look like creepy uncles and aunts that the kids have been warned to stay away from during family gatherings.
Right, right, the show. Well, the opening episode This Could Be a Real Adventure follows through the 1-2-3s of kiddie shows faithfully.
We have a planet that looks a lot like Earth, only with schools having a dress code that let furries wear their fursuits in class. That’s At Attin.
We have male kids that are daydreaming of adventures: Wim and his buddy Neel—the elephant that is currently shipped by grown-ups with some other furry. We have female kids that are outgoing because present year: Fern and KB that dream of taking part in hoverbike racing. I’m sure that will come in handy during chases later. The whole fun begins when they discover what seems to be a buried starship, and ooh, throw in pirates and Jude Law staring into the tail end of his career path and voila, we have a new show to fill up a slot on Disney+.
On the bright side, the kids are not too annoying. They feel like tropes with legs and mouths at this point, but still, maybe they will develop into more memorable characters in the coming episodes.
Still, I suppose it’s too early to judge the show, as the story is just beginning. What I can say is that I’m not traumatized enough to say no to watch the rest of the episodes, but I am not exactly chomping at the teeth to.
One big reason for this is that the pacing feels off a bit in this episode. There are many scenes that feel unnecessarily slow and drawn out, maybe to pad up the airtime. This is an epidermic in the recent Disney+ shows, however, so I can only wonder whether this is some kind of Lucasfilm mandate. It’s like they have enough for a 40-minute show, but they need to split it up into two or three episodes, so let’s just stretch things out.
So yes, I can take it or leave it at this stage, so I suppose three oogies will be just about right.
