If Disney+’s new drama Star Wars: Skeleton Crew When I made my debut at eight or nine years old, things would have abruptly faltered Knight rider And The Dukes of Hazzard aside to become young Daniel’s favorite television show.

While the original star Wars Saga, a series of three and only three films that I was hardly the only one obsessed with, was designed to be welcoming to children, but at the same time it was a world generally devoid of children. Instead, we focused on alien creatures or robots that either resembled or behaved like children – as well as Luke Skywalker, whose story took him from immature youth to mature Jedi.

At the same time, with Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment at the helm, we were treated to a range of Junior Quest narratives of varying quality – films that captured one of the last cultural moments in which children were allowed to stroll around in the morning and carry on a day of adventure and return home without her parents freaking out about her unsupervised, phone-free existence. It is a genre that includes AND, pasture, SpaceCamp, Adventures in babysitting, The Goonies and too many others to mention.

Skeleton crew Creators Jon Watts and Christopher Ford have made no secret of their inspiration when attempting to create an Amblin-style story star Wars universe, and in the three episodes sent to critics they were generally successful. Although the coming-of-age narrative is far less transgressive than Watts and Ford’s pitch suggests—uber-powerful teen heroes and their gruff babysitters were already the backbone of the Disney+/Lucasfilm brand—the series is lively and entertaining. The generally low-stakes, thematically loose, young game takes us to unexplored corners of the seemingly limitless galaxy and feels pleasantly familiar.

Our adventure begins on Attin, an Earth-like planet that clearly resembles a suburb of Spielberg, California circa 1982. This sea of ​​custom-built houses, cul-de-sacs, and lawn-mowing droids is a perfectly normal place, and Wim (Ravi Cabot -Conyers) is an ordinary child raised by an overly busy father (Tunde Adebimpe). Wim loves playing with his buddy Neel (Robert Timothy Smith), who comes from a blue elephant-like race that is apparently NOT from the same blue elephant-like race that gave us Max Rebo before.

While Neel follows rules and dreams no bigger than his manicured backyard, Wim longs for something more – which is complicated because his elementary school class is about to take a career placement exam that will funnel students into a workforce that favors future analysts Administrators. There is no place for someone like Wim, who wants to be a hero but doesn’t even know what a hero would look like.

Then Wim, obsessed with stories about Jedis, finds something buried in a ravine in the forest next to his neighborhood. He believes it is a Jedi temple; Instead, it’s a spaceship. Wim is quickly and unexpectedly sent into space with Neel and the slightly older children Fern (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), the rebellious and high-achieving daughter of a local official (the somewhat exhausted Kerry Condon), and KB (Kyriana Kratter), Fern’s tech-savvy husband hurled smart best friend.

Soon this children’s quartet disappears into space – not to be confused Lost in spaceone of several clear inspirations that (apart from later reboots and remakes) were created before the frame of reference for the core audience of older millennials and their tween children.

None of the young characters are deeply complicated – although I never had to go through puberty as a blue, elephant-like creature, so it might be more difficult than I suspect – but the appealing, youthful energy between the four leads evokes what Watts thinks with slightly older characters in his Spider-Man Movies. You don’t worry for a second that the children are in danger, despite the title, which comes from the actual corpses on the ship in which they travel. But all four performances, in Smith’s case primarily vocal performances, are in that well-curated Spielbergian vein that encompasses both great wonder and persistent courage.

You’ll notice that Jude Law, the multiple Oscar nominee and easily the biggest star of the cast, has barely been mentioned so far (with the possible exception of Jaleel White, who plays a pirate who carries out a series of crazy events with the cool confidence of one husband observed). man who actually didn’t). Law’s Jod Na Nawood, who appears in the second chapter, is presented as a very familiar genre archetype – the selfish villain who befriends our little protagonists even though we know we shouldn’t trust him completely under any circumstances.

Will future episodes reveal that while we think he’s only in it for himself/the money, he’s actually just a collection of rough edges in need of the smoothing that only comes from an intense window of forced paternal activity can be? Who can say for sure, but given the precedent The Mandalorian And Obi Wan Kenobi (and to a lesser extent both The Acolyte And Ahsoka), I’m going to go out on a limb and say, “Yeah. Jod Na Nawood is probably just a big old softie at heart.” Prove me wrong, Skeleton crew!

Not coincidentally, this is a role that speaks to many of the things Law plays best – namely, the kind of man you would follow into battle even if you suspected him to be a villain. If Gigolo was Joe Virgil through Fred Astaire, leading an innocent “child” through a nightmarish Spielbergian inferno AI Artificial IntelligenceJod Na Nawood is Virgil via Errol Flynn and performs a similar task.

It’s my adult instinct that the narrative initially lacks a central villain or a goal beyond “Four Kids Want to Go Home.” But…why is that my instinct? The format of the “homeward odyssey” is quite resilient and allows for individual journeys of self-discovery. Wim in particular still has a lot of growing up to do as he goes from zero to hero, so to speak. Fern is a natural leader, but she hasn’t yet figured out how to combine her fierceness and her authority. KB and Neel will probably learn to be more adventurous when they discover that the society they come from and the rules it follows may not be what they seem.

And if that doesn’t work for you, Skeleton crew features a lot of space piracy that very young viewers will compare to pirates of the Caribbean (or One piecewhich is actually a very close tonal pairing in both the anime and Netflix versions), viewers my age will compare The Goonies and more experienced viewers will compare themselves to vintage swashbucklers The Sea Falcon or Captain Blood. In Mick Giacchino’s great score you can hear a lot of John Williams, but at least as much of the composers who inspired Williams, such as Erich Wolfgang Korngold. In a show where the effects are good and the set pieces are decent, Giacchino’s music is the element that often elevates otherwise modest (or intimate) trappings.

So maybe there’s no treasure that the characters are looking for, and maybe there’s also no sense that there’s likely to be major consequences if they fail to achieve a certain goal. That makes it undoubtedly Skeleton crew I feel more amorphous than would be acceptable if the series had been reduced to a film. Instead, each episode takes the characters to a different outpost in space, none of which are exactly places we’ve visited before. There are no generic desert planets or swamp planets. There’s a miserable hive full of scum and villains, but it’s more like an interstellar rest stop than Mos Eisley – which is good, because if the series had visited Mos Eisley, there’s a chance Neel and Max Rebo could have crossed paths and violence The creators declare that Neel, whatever species he is, is not an Ortolan.

Several other background characters in Skeleton crew look vaguely like creatures we’ve seen in previous franchise entries, but this isn’t a show that relies on callbacks or redirects. The down-to-earth class criticism of Andor or the gap-filling imperative of some other recent Disney+ series, making them completely standalone in a way I appreciated. The kids may know certain parts of the franchise mythology, but they don’t care about Jedi genetics or government oppression or trade policy details. They have never left their home planet before, so everything is amazing, scary or sad to them in a serious emotional sense.

Watts and then David Lowery, who directed the climax of the second and third episodes Pete’s dragon Form, wants to sincerely honor the characters’ experience. Although they’re drawn to cute creatures, strange food, and spooky-but-not-too-scary circumstances, the joy lies mostly in the “what if?” of it all. I’m curious to see if there’s more tonal or visual excitement in later installments directed by The Daniels and Lee Isaac Chung, but I’m willing to accept that Skelton crew intends to be something more modest and accessible to all generations.

Skeleton crew is a show about and for brave kids (and inner kids) who can play outside after dark and imagine a larger world beyond the reach of a simple bike ride. If you accept the mantra that not everyone star Wars There has to be a series Andorit’s probably my favorite non-Andor star Wars series since then The Mandalorian started.