Skeleton Crew and the Grubby Mitts of Industry
I watched the first episode of Skeleton Crew, the new Star Wars show, yesterday and I really enjoyed it. It is fun and sweet. The designs of familiar-but-different space suburbia are great. I loved the effects that looked like puppetry (maybe they are CG, I don't know). I felt positive about it.
And yet.
I've felt differently about Star Wars since the last movie. The Rise of Skywalker didn't annoy or anger me. For me, it was like watching a committee pitching ideas for Star Wars. Here are some things we could put in this movie when we make it. This is a very good meme about it:
The Rise of Skywalker was a turning point for me with mega-budget movies. It was the first time I sat in a cinema and thought of what I was watching as fan fiction. Disney paid $4 billion to George Lucas so that the fan fiction they produce has a little asterisk next to it and some small print saying "We call dibs on this being real." I'm not calling it fan fiction as a negative. There is plenty of good fan fiction for all sorts of stories. I've written some that I think is good. I don't think RoS was good fan fiction. It was undercooked to the point of not being definitive. It's like the old Sesame Street songs of which of these things does not belong. The nine mainline Star Wars films (of varying quality, admittedly) feel like eight films and then some preliminary work for a ninth.
This might sound like hyperbole but it was like a switch was flicked in my brain and it left me thinking "I don't care about this anymore." Here was some people's idea about what could be done with Star Wars. It was one idea among many. I've read published books from another version of what happens after Return of the Jedi. Those books vary in quality too, but I remember some very fondly.
Maybe this experience was an age thing, or an interest thing. Like I'd outgrown it, and that happened roughly around the same time as the film's release. Maybe it coincided with a more general fatigue with production-line mega-budget movies. Certainly the difference in direction between Rise of Skywalker and the previous film in the series was a factor - it was clear the committee making these things weren't unanimous about what they were doing.
To return to Skeleton Crew, Disney's new show. Space Goonies. I watched one episode and then cancelled Disney+ because it was due to renew the next day. I'll pick up the subscription again at some point and watch more. Or maybe I won't watch more. I'm not sure yet. I enjoyed it, but it opens with all this franchise branding. It is embedded in the Star Wars section of the Disney+ interface alongside a bunch of other stuff I dabbled with and didn't care for. It is part of a corporate initiative. I'm sure it featured in a bunch of PowerPoint presentations for the Q4 roadmap.
All the charm of the show, the young actors' performances, the remarkable design work, has a barrier to punch through in me. I often think about that idea of separating the art and the artist, when some creator has done something unsavoury, and I tend to come down on the side of choosing to watch or read it anyway. But currently, stuff made by Disney has a real stink on it, for me. Not just Disney really, but they are the most obvious example.
To end positively, I'm currently watching Killjoys. It's a Canadian sci fi show from a few years ago that I completely missed out on the first time around. It's great. I'll write about it again here, but the relevant point now is that it is relatively low budget (there are minutes of the pilot of Skeleton Crew that could probably finance whole episodes of Killjoys) and it is sleek and coherent in its story and characters.
I still get enthusiastic about this kind of fiction. I suppose the ideal thing would be to give anything a fair shake no matter where it comes from, but years of Disney attempting to dominate filmed genre fiction has built a bias in me. I don't want to like their stuff.
I guess it says something about Skeleton Crew that it came up against that barrier in me and made a crack.