“Skeleton Crew” creators explain “Star Wars Holiday Special” tribute

Jon Watts and Christopher Ford explain how they pulled off that familiar scene in the premiere.

Warning: This article contains spoilers about the premiere episode of Star Wars: Skeleton Crew.

The latest Star Wars series, titled Skeleton Crew, bills itself as a throwback to the Amblin adventure movies of yesteryear. But the Dec. 2 premiere on Disney+ also featured some Easter eggs and callbacks to franchise moments of the past.

In fact, the first scene mirrored the first-ever Star Wars scene. As a ship prepared to be boarded by a band of pirates, soldiers waited with blasters drawn for the impending intruders. It was extremely reminiscent of the rebel alliance soldiers at the beginning of A New Hope waiting for Darth Vader and the Stormtroopers to enter their ship. And it was also extremely deliberate.

“That one’s definite,” premiere director and series cocreator Jon Watts tells Entertainment Weekly of the tribute. “Big time.”

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So what made them want to reference that classic Star Wars shot? “We wanted to do that and then combine it with our other big influence, which was old pirate movies,” says Watts. “So it's sort of a combination between the ship battles that you would see in Captain Blood or The Sea Hawk or these old pirate serials with A New Hope. We wanted to show what a pirate raid would look like, and using that New Hope sort of structure as the framework.”

“These pirates, they would just swing onto the deck of the other ship as just a teaming mass,” adds series cocreator Christopher Ford. “And they're not just Stormtroopers who are organized attacking with machetes. It's just a little bit more insane.”

Speaking of insane, the most surprising callback to a Star Wars project from the 1970s occurred later in the premiere, when Neel's (Robert Timothy Smith) family was watching a hologram show in their living room. But not just any hologram show. It appeared to be the same demented space circus hologram originally viewed by Chewbacca’s son Lumpy in the infamous 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special.

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How and why did this clear hat tip to the one Star Wars project George Lucas immediately disowned after a single embarrassing airing on Nov. 17, 1978, make it on to Skeleton Crew? “That is easily one of my favorite parts of the whole show,” says Watts. “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.”

And if anyone was wondering: No, that is not the original Star Wars Holiday Special footage. “We recreated it,” Watts confirms. “We initially wanted to see if we could get the original footage, but it's so low resolution because it was a TV special.”

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

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Once the duo realized they could not simply lift the original scene out of the Holiday Special, they got to work on staging their own space circus, which included making sure their recreation was accurate to the original Bob Mackie clothing. “We went into the archives and got all the original wardrobe designs, and the original sketches from the show, and recreated it,” reveals Watts. “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.”

The new scene didn’t just have to look right, it had to sound right. “The music was another thing that we had to recreate, because it didn't exist in any form except for on YouTube,” Watts says. “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.”

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In the end, Watts and Ford definitely did a job that would have made Lumpy proud. “We spent a lot of time and effort recreating that so much, just for that one little visual gag,” admits Watts. “But it makes me really happy, and it makes me wonder what that circus troop is up to.”

Of course, the tributes to previous Star Wars projects on Skeleton Crew do not stop there. Witness Wim (Ravi Cabot-Conyers) tells Fern (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) that her bike is “totally wizard” — a call back to Kitster telling young Anakin that his podracer is “so wizard” in The Phantom Menace. “There are a lot,” Watts shares of the Easter eggs. “I don't want to give 'em all up. I want people to find them, but there are quite a few deep cuts in there.”