TV Shows Watched: Skeleton Crew: S1E1 (Disney Plus) with audio description, What We Do In The Shadows: S6E8 (Hulu) with audio description, 911 lone Star: S5E? (Hulu) no audio description, Interior Chinatown: S1E10 (Hulu) with audio description.
Podcasts: none
YouTube: None.
Movies: Nowhere Special (Screener) no audio description
Interior Chinatown finished, with audio description. Maybe it was just a glitch in the matrix. But, I did enjoy what was there, and it really is a quirky show unlike anything else on right now.
But I feel like if I don’t talk about Skeleton Crew, I’d be burying the lead. Disney has had a hard time pleasing the internet with its wide array of MCU shows, and Star Wars projects. for me, I’ve really enjoyed basically every Marvel effort, but the Star Wars stuff seems to not understand what makes it cool. We’ve had to deal with Space Witches, in more than one series, and now we have Space Pirates, little kids going to school and living in some very earth-like suburban dreamscape, and I don’t know how this brings people in. I don’t know how this fixes anything, but what I will give it credit for, is feeling totally like its own thing. They just tried to pull this off with the Acolyte. The concept of finally not needing franchise or legacy characters seemingly had eluded them, except for Skeleton Crew, who at least in the first episode is void of those trappings.
However, as much as I enjoy the Goonies in Space, I can’t help but wonder if the people now running Lucasfilm have any idea what ‘A long Time Ago In A Galaxy Far Far Away” actually means. When we were first dropped into the Star Wars universe, there were some slight elements that resembled earth, but a lot of it really felt like a uniquely science fiction experience. Not just like an alternate version of our reality, but a true fantasy. Skeleton Crew has taken soso many of earth’s typical behavior that I honestly wonder if anyone at all working in this space was ever a fan of Star Wars.
The previous shows tried to stay close to what had been done before, but started introducing things like witches, because i suppose The Force, Wookies, and Lightsabers aren’t interesting on their own? Here, we have a pretty standard Pirate opening sequence, and then the rest is a bunch of kids who are worried about missing the tram to school, studying for exams, fixing their bicycles, blowing past the neighbor walking her frog dog. There’s a scene where the main kid comes home and flops down on the couch. It’s not that these kids aren’t engaging. I think the main kids are really well cast. But, this show feels like if you just took a few references to the Jedi out of it, it could be anything. There’s very little that resembles the Skywalker saga, or anything George Lucas initially brought to life. Instead, it feels like four kids are skipping school, exploring somewhere they shouldn’t be, and they get in over their head and end up on a ship that is headed somewhere. That feels like a 90’s Disney Movie. It feels like Disney could have made this movie as a response to the success of The Goonies, possibly with the director of Flight Of Then Navigator.
The audio description here was good, pointing out that one girl had a fuzzy face, or the frog dog reference, and even the direct reference to a couch. there are too many creature comforts in this show, which has actual creatures. I don’t know what to tell Disney and Lucasfilm, because while I enjoyed Skeleton Crew on some level, I enjoyed it not as an entity of Star Wars, and the mentions of Jedi just annoyed me more than helped. I wish this had just been developed separately, since it has no earthly idea what a long time ago in a galaxy far far away even looks like. And it really sucks to see Jon Watts as the creative force here, as his work on Tom holland’s Spider-Man, as well as some engaging smaller fare. But with Holland, he seems to understand what makes Spider-Man cool, and hasn’t tried to completely dismantle the formula through a lack of inspiration. I’m sure here, he had thoughts, but I always go back to that one big question which every person now adapting Star Wars seems at odds with. ‘Why do I like Star Wars to begin with?” Or, ‘What makes Star Wars cool.”
Somehow, one of the greatest leaps in cinematic history keeps being reduced to shows that lack the initial creativity required to turn Star Wars into a success in the first place. It’s time to start over.
