At the beginning of the new Disney+ series Star Wars: Skeleton Crewwe meet our young hero Wim (Ravi Cabot-Conyers). He’s in a bedroom that looks very much like one you might find in a suburban house here on Earth in the ’80s, and he’s playing with a pair of dolls that are roughly the same size and design as the action figures that Kenner released the original star Wars Film trilogy. Wim and his best friend Neel (Robert Timothy Smith) engage in simulated lightsaber battles while waiting for the bus to school. And when Wim Neel asks, “Don’t you ever want to do anything exciting?”, he could just as easily be cosplaying as Luke from the first scenes of the first film.

In these scenes, Skeleton crew Creators Jon Watts and Christopher Ford make their intentions clear: they want to tell a story about what it would be like if some were believing young people star Wars Fans of the original trilogy somehow found themselves in an adventure very similar to those that captivated them on the big screen. It’s not exactly a fan fiction inserted by the author, because Skeleton crew is not involved in any of the Skywalker Saga characters and because Watts and Ford are far from the only adult versions of Wim and Neel. And it’s not even the first star Wars Project to be framed this way since Rey in The Force Awakens was portrayed as a fan excited to meet Han and Luke. But between Wim’s unwavering belief in the old legends and various exposed Easter eggs of ’80s pop culture, Watts and Ford lean into the nostalgic fantasy as much as any pop culture property has since at least 2011 The Muppetsin which Jason Segel could imagine a world where he and a thinly disguised Muppet version of himself could team up with Kermit, Fozzie and friends.

This is fundamentally not a setback for this idea, whether in general (I like it the most). The Muppets) or as expressly stated in Skeleton crewa solid piece of entertainment for all ages with good direction from Watts (Spider-Man: Homecoming) and David Lowery (The Green Knight) and some funny set pieces. It’s about telling an actual story and telling it so well that it doesn’t feel like a glorified version of a story star Wars Amusement park ride. Just be prepared for things like Sam and Neel’s Neighborhood to be obviously modeled after Sam and Neel’s Neighborhood ET: The Alien; for having various early scenes of children on bicycles in the forest (a la AND And The Goonies); and even for the title font, which also dates back to the 1980s Stranger Thingsreminiscent of Stephen King’s books. It wears its influences with obvious pride, harkening back to a time a little less distant and a dead end fairly close by.

How The Mandalorianstill Disney+’s most popular live action star Wars shows, Skeleton crew takes place in this gap in between Return of the Jedi And Power awakens. As the opening title explains, the Empire is gone and the Republic is back in charge, but struggles to maintain order, especially on the edge of the galaxy, where pirates prey on ships just trying to get their cargo from one point to another bring another. Wim, Neel, and their classmates Fern (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) and KB (Kyriana Kratter) don’t seem to know much about current events, having grown up on a planet called Attin, which is surrounded by a barrier so thick the night sky doesn’t even have it Stars. Neel seems perfectly content doing well in school, Wim dreams of adventure, and Fern and KB constantly skip class to race around town on Fern’s speeder bike.

As in suburban fairy tales from any era or star system, the children come from a variety of household types: Wim is a latchkey child raised by his overworked father Wendle (Tunde Adebimpe), Fern is a troublemaker who has to act squeaky clean in front of her mother, a politician, Fara (Kerry Condon), and Neel have a large, supportive family. If Neel didn’t have blue skin and an elephant-like trunk, and if KB didn’t wear a Geordi LaForge-style cybernetic visor, and if her school wasn’t partially staffed by droids, most of the first scenes could actually take place on present-day Earth. And even the most startling incident in the show has its origins in an incredibly mundane situation: Wim oversleeps, misses the bus, and discovers what he thinks is a Jedi temple while trying to take a shortcut to school.

The early scenes effectively convey the temperaments of the four children and the sheltered nature of the world in which they live. But Skeleton crew doesn’t really get going, either literally or figuratively, until Wim accidentally strands the quartet far from home, with only an abandoned pirate droid, SM-33 (voiced suitably gruffly by Nick Frost), available to help them survive Territory far more hostile than anything they have ever imagined, let alone experienced. Watts, Ford and Lowery all have a good sense of how much danger seems both plausible and appropriate given the age of our heroes, and how to further escalate the fish-out-of-water dynamic. And when Jude Law shows up late in the second episode as a man Wim assumes is a Jedi, he adds a necessary dose of mystery and cynicism, all the better star Wars Projects know how to encompass.

The storytelling is robust enough to prevent this Skeleton crew to ever fully fall into shameless fan service. Even a sequence where Fern and Wim have to man the turrets of a spaceship during a dogfight is more about them being understandably overwhelmed by the danger and responsibility of the moment than about them finding themselves in a similar situation we saw them with Luke and Finn in the cinema.

As we approach the 50th anniversary of the first film, it’s getting harder and harder to find new places to go star Wars. Even the best of the TV series, AndorOn the one hand, it’s about closing gaps between films; It’s simply a matter of approaching this task in a more thematically ambitious manner than the franchise normally allows. In his completely different way Skeleton crew also tries to see this area with fresh eyes – in this case, four teenagers who should probably be in science class not figuring out how to get a ship into hyperspace. If we can’t go to a new place, Skeleton crew This makes everything feel practically new for Wim, Neel, Fern and KB.

The first two episodes of Star Wars: Skeleton Crew are now streaming on Disney+, with additional episodes released weekly. I’ve seen the first three episodes.