For as much of it as there is, Star Wars is a tricky endeavor to get right. The setting is malleable enough to tell a thousand stories and then some, a scope and variety that has been key to its endurance. But it’s also a series that has an intangible feeling that has to link it all together. Star Wars can be anything, but anything still has to feel like Star Wars to fit into that grand tapestry. It’s a challenge every new addition to the galaxy far, far away has to face head on, but there’s also an easy way to overcome it: having some really good Star Wars names.
And Skeleton Crew, the upcoming live-action streaming adventure series, has some good-ass Star Wars names.
“They have to have a sort of a rhythm to them. They have to have… like a kind of a plausible reference to another language without sounding silly,” Jude Law, who plays the extremely Star Wars-named Jod Na Nawood in the series, mused to io9 in an interview over Zoom recently. “And I like, they tend to roll off the tongue, right?”
Jod is just one of many names that into that Star Wars ephemera that makes Skeleton Crew feel a part of the galaxy far, far away in the series, a rhythm that sits alongside the pitter-patter naming conventions of the series’ young protagonists—Wim, Neel, Fern, and KB—and everything from their droid companion (SM-33, played by Nick Frost, a pointed, piratical nod to Smee from Peter Pan) to alien beings glimpsed in trailers like Brutus the Shistavanen pirate captain. Creating new parts of the Star Wars lexicon that feel at home with what’s already known was, for series co-creators Jon Watts and Christopher Ford, part of the fun.
“It’s tricky because sometimes it’s a very earth name, like Luke. Wim, we spent a long time trying to figure out what Wim’s name should be,” Watts told io9. “It’s fun when you’re writing with your best friend, because you’re just trying it out on the other person, and they’re trying it out on you. If you can do it enough back and forth and not burst into laughter, you’re like ‘that’ll work!'”
“It is a strange part of writing. It’s not telling a story, it’s closer to like… a weird form of micro-poetry. It’s like naming a pet or a kid, where it has to be a name you can yell,” Ford added, before testing out one of the duo’s creations with a cry of “Wim!”
According to Watts, it’s where the inspiration came from for the adorable alien member of Skeleton Crew‘s quartet of kids, Neel (played by Robert Timothy Smith), came from. “I was staying at a hotel, and I just remember hearing a little kid going ‘Neil, Neil, Neil!‘,” Watts recalled. “I saw this tiny little boy just running through the lobby, and then his slightly taller sister chasing after him. And I thought ‘that’s a really great name to yell!'” And, as Ford pointed out, there’s a fun parallel—the first time we hear Luke’s name uttered in Star Wars is when Aunt Beru calls out for her nephew across the Lars homestead. So the ability to yell a name is, seemingly, a fundamental detail in Star Wars worldbuilding.
But for the young heroes whose names are being yelled, it wasn’t any of their own Star Wars names that were their favorite bits of terminology to use on the show.
“There’s a term that I got to use so much, and I’m so glad I did, which was ‘Wizard,'” Ravi Cabot-Conyers, who plays Wim, teased of the boy’s use of the young Anakin Skywalker’s descriptor of choice. “When something is ‘wizard’ it’s so cool it’s beyond belief, and sometimes [Watts] would go ‘this would be an appropriate time to use that word,’, and then others it would be like ‘okay, you’ve gotta stop saying that.’ It was very funny, that balance, and so much fun—learning all the new terminology was just really funny, but I did get to say wizard a lot.”
We’ll find out just how many more wizard names Skeleton Crew has up its sleeves when the series beings streaming on Disney+ December 3.
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