Star Wars: Skeleton Crew will feature space pirates inspired by Monkey Island!

It's been an interesting time in the galaxy far, far away these past few years. While Star Wars movies have stalled out — at least until The Mandalorian & Grogu hits the big screen in 2025 — there have been plenty of television shows to tide us over. Some of those have been transcendent, like Andor. Others have failed to capture a wide enough audience to continue and been canceled, like The Acolyte. You never quite know how new Star Wars shows will go over until they're out.

The next show coming down the pike is Skeleton Crew, and after hearing co-creator Jon Watts' latest comments about it, I'm officially excited. Skeleton Crew is about a group of four children who discover a secret, and then have to go on a galaxy-spanning journey with a mysterious man named Jod Na Nawood (Jude Law) in order to get home. They'll no doubt face plenty of obstacles along the way...including space pirates!

Entertainment Weekly just revealed an exclusive first look image of those pirates, alongside an interview with Skeleton Crew creators Jon Watts and Christopher Ford. You'll have to EW if you want to see the full image of those pirates in all their glory, but there are a few exciting tidbits to note. The first is that one of them is played by Jaleel White, who's famous for playing Steve Urkel on Family Matters. Another is that one of those pirates, Vane (Marti Matulis), appeared in season 3 of The Mandalorian, where he faced off with the Mando and Greef Karga.

That gives us a good idea of where in the timeline the show sits, after The Mandalorian season 3 but before The Force Awakens. When we last saw Vane, he was abandoning his fellow pirates amid the pirate siege on Nevarro. It looks like he's fallen in with another crew. “With the era we're in, we're kind of getting to play with that lawless thing,” Ford said. “The Empire is gone, and so we're playing with a part of the galaxy that has a resurgence of piracy.”

On the whole, pirates were something the Skeleton Crew team were especially excited to explore, since they've got a long history in the films. “Pirates are talked about so much in Star Wars,” Ford notes. “People would call Han Solo a pirate and he'd be like, ‘How dare you?’ And we've seen some awesome pirates in the animated shows. So this was something where both [executive producers] Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau were really excited to do more pirate stuff.”

However, it wasn't just Star Wars that inspired the particular tone of Skeleton Crew's pirates. “I'm also a big fan of Monkey Island,” said Watts. “That's also classic Lucas. So somewhere between Star Wars pirates and Monkey Island pirates. I think we found our sweet spot.”

And that gets me excited. If you're not familiar with Monkey Island, it was a series of puzzle-solving video games that LucasArts produced starting in the 1990s. They had a pretty wacky and hilarious sense of humor, which bodes well for Skeleton Crew.

Watts also spoke about how much it helps the Skeleton Crew team to have Dave Filoni behind them. “What's great about working at Lucasfilm is that they'll let you know if you've gone outside of the boundaries,” Watts explained. “Dave Filoni is our goalkeeper.”

"He actually is a great hockey player, but he's also a figurative goalkeeper. We will come up with ideas of things that we like, and then he'll be like, ‘Actually, maybe it's this.’ Or, ‘Oh, we already did something like that somewhere else.’ And you always end up with a bunch of other episodes of Star Wars to go watch and things to go read, and it's good. You feel like you can safely explore things creatively without making some huge canonical mistake."

- Jon Watts

Star Wars: Skeleton Crew premieres on December 3. With any luck, Jon Watts and Christopher Ford have created a series that will resonate with viewers both young and old. And they're not the only ones hoping to inject some fun into Star Wars:

To stay up to date on everything fantasy, science fiction, and WiC, follow our all-encompassing Facebook page and Twitter account, sign up for our exclusive newsletter and check out our YouTube channel.