The showrunners, co-creators and EPs, self-described ‘Star Wars’ nuts, discuss how they turned the entire empire upside down on the new Lucasfilm 3DCG series, where good guys are bad, bad guys are good, and Jar Jar Binks may well be… a Sith lord; now streaming on Disney+.
One would think that two well-known screenwriters who are loud and proud about their decades-long love affair with Star Wars would have, at some point, been asked, “What do you love about Star Wars?” But it turns out AWN was the first to pose the question in our interview with the showrunners about their new series, LEGO Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy.
“It’s funny that we’ve never been asked that considering how much we talk about it,” says Dan Hernandez, showrunner, co-creator and executive producer, along with Benji Samit, of LEGO Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy. “Star Wars is deceptively sophisticated in a lot of ways, and I think you have a different relationship to it as you get older. When you're a kid, you maybe don't realize there are really complex ideas about oneness with life and death, what it means to be a luminous being, what it means to be connected to everyone and the nature of moving on after death. I think about the scene where they walk into Mos Eisley, a spaceport on Tatooine, where everyone is speaking their own languages and having their own cultural practices. The emotions are there when you’re a kid but then, as you grow up, the thought process is there as well.”
The deep philosophical underpinnings of the Star Wars galaxy served as anchors for an otherwise chaotic Star Wars project where everything fans know about Star Wars is blown apart, torn down, and rebuilt in a new way.
LEGO Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy, now on Disney+, is a four-part special where the entire Star Wars galaxy gets completely mixed up when an ordinary nerf-herder, Sig Greebling (Gaten Matarazzo), unearths a powerful artifact from a hidden Jedi temple. He finds himself thrust into adventure in a new, wondrously wild and twisted version of the galaxy where good guys are bad, bad guys are good, and the fate of all depends on Sig becoming the hero who can put all the pieces back together.
Check out the trailer:
The 3DCG series features an incredible voice cast including Mark Hamill, Michael Cusack, Gaten Matarazzo, Marsai Martin, Tony Revolori, Bobby Moynihan, Ahmed Best, and others. Fans will finally get to experience the conspiracy theory many have longed for: Jar Jar Binks as a Sith Lord.
“We had to explore what it meant to rebuild something that we knew a lot about and loved dearly,” notes Hernandez. “And one of the things we’re getting at – especially with a character like Beach Luke – is that even though his character’s circumstances are different, there is still a spark of heroism in this person, regardless of which version of the galaxy you put him in. I think Star Wars is very adaptable regarding what it can be and how it can be presented. And we are interested in exploring those boundaries and horizons.”
And LEGOs seemed like the perfect medium for which to break down and rebuild the Star Wars universe and its characters.
“Essentially what we’re trying to do with the show is recreate the way kids, or adults in our case, play with their LEGOs,” explains Samit. “If you give a kid a bin full of Star Wars LEGOs, they dump it on the ground and start mixing things up. They don’t just do the exact plot of the movie. Everything is mashed together, and we wanted to show that in the series. Of course, that kid’s bin is also filled with probably like five or more Obi-Wans and I can confirm there is only one of each character in our show. We didn’t want to spiral too much.”
Much like Star Wars has always thrown viewers headfirst into an intergalactic world where the alien species, politics, history and technology are not explained but experienced as the story progresses, Samit and Hernandez use the character of Sig to represent every Star Wars fan as this character is thrown into a completely different Star Wars world where the rules and reference points all have to be re-learned. This is now a world where Tatooine becomes a beach destination, Ewoks become bounty hunters, Sith become Jedi… and the list goes on.
“We’re not trying to ruin the thing that we love,” assures Samit. “We’re finding those little nuggets that haven’t been explored yet and creating more Star Wars stories to bond over.”
One of the Star Wars professions that had yet to be explored outside of Jedi, Siths, scrap collectors, cloners, and government officials was a Nerf Herder. Paralleling the role of a shepherd, Nerf Herders take care of the cow-like animals that inhabit the planet Alderaan. This is Sig’s job of choice.
“It’s a role that goes back to the beginning of Star Wars, but we’ve never actually seen what that look like in a Star Wars story like this,” says Samit. “Actually, when Dan and I were in college, hanging out, bonding over Star Wars, we would talk and say, ‘Oh it would be fun to see a story about a Nerf Herder.”
Not only have both Hernandez and Samit been collecting Star Wars LEGO for 25 years, but one of their first friend hangouts was seeing Revenge of the Sith in college. As they entered the professional workforce, the duo made their mark in the animation world by working on adaptations within other well-known franchises like Pokémon Detective Pikachu and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem. But this is the first time they are not only working on their own adaptation, but also one that’s so ingrained in their childhoods.
“We loved Pokémon but that came out when we were in high school,” shares Hernandez. “I’d been watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles since I was five years old, so working on that film was good training ground for getting ready to make this series. We are doing our own thing, but I’d say it’s spiritually the same.”
Hernandez adds, “You can’t second guess yourself on something like this. You have to trust your instinct as a fan. It’s like jumping out of a plane. If you think about it too much, you’ll never do it.”
Creating this series, animated by Lucasfilm and Atomic Cartoons using Maya, came with plenty of challenges outside of all the tedious fact-checking regarding the narrative that encompasses three different timelines. The biggest challenge when it came to animation production, the creatives shared, was doing a brick-animated hyper-speed sequence.
“Things like the star field and hyper-speed always stay the same in previous LEGO Star Wars content,” shares Samit. “We haven’t changed the star field and the hyper-speed since the 70s. So, we came up with the idea to do both a brick-built star field with LEGO studs and, more ambitiously, a brick-built hyper-speed with a variety of LEGOs, including lightning LEGO pieces.”
Hernandez adds, “That is my favorite pieces of animation in the show. It makes me smile every time I see it. The whole team at Atomic Cartoons really went above and beyond to make something that feels sophisticated, cinematic and beautiful.”
Though the animation is 3DCG and not stop-motion, the creators felt strongly about not relying on graphics to fill in spaces that could be built with more LEGOs. The visuals are an homage to LEGO stop-motion and the LEGO fandom as a whole.
“There’s been so much LEGO content in different styles over the years,” says Samit. “But, in Star Wars LEGO stories specifically, there’s been a lot of CG animation where the characters are allowed to bend their limbs and whatnot. We didn’t want that in this series. We wanted to stay true to the nature of LEGO and its real-world limitations. We wanted to push it into that more traditional stop-motion-esque style because, honestly, we’re massive nerds and there’s a proud history of LEGO Star Wars fan films before LEGO made anything official for the franchise.”
Hernandez and Samit say creating this series has been “a career highlight,” and, despite moments when they wondered if they were going too far or changing too much, they ultimately had a blast pulling the show together. And they aren’t shy about making it known they’d like to do more in this world.
“When we're mashing up the entire Star Wars galaxy, there's only so many characters we can get in there, so there's a lot more corners of the galaxy that we would love the opportunity to explore,” shares Samit. Hernandez adds, “And there were some hard cuts of characters or situations that we loved, but just couldn't quite figure out how to get it all in the time frame that we had. So, we would love to continue doing this. That would be a dream.”
Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime. She's reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment. Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com.
