Skeleton Crew

The remix of Peter Schilling’s 1989 new wave song “Major Tom (Völlig losgelöst)” in last week’s official trailer for the Lucasfilm/Disney+ series Skeleton Crew automatically connects it to the sci-fi action comedy genre, evoking the classic rock aesthetic of films like Borderlands or Thor: Love and Thunder.  

In the first 12 seconds of the trailer, the only words of dialogue are “what are you in for?” spoken by Wim (Ravi Cabot-Conyers) and Fern (Ryan Kiera Armstrong). This leaves plenty of sonic space for synthesizer bass to propel the trailer forward. Pulsing rock drums arrive at 0:04 as we see shots of Fern racing through traffic on a speeder.

Yes our main characters are kids, but hold onto your hats, this story promises to be a wild ride!

After a high intensity start, we relax slightly at 0:12, as a piano note rings out and the synth bass fades before disappearing entirely at 0:!5, when Wim’s father walks in and reprimands him.

But the synths and the drums aren’t gone for long, and by 0:20 they are pulsing away again (now joined by a gritty electric guitar) as title cards on screen show us the credentials of the series’ creators. A group of four kids is now assembling, and they have found what appears to be a long-buried spaceship.

Once they enter it, Wim naturally ignores the advice not to touch anything. The music cuts to silence at 0:36, drawing our attention to the close-up of Wim pressing a green light, accompanied by a crescendoing drum roll.

Immediately we cut to the space ship’s thrusters firing and the space ship begins to take off, but not without a clever count-off from the drums at 0:40, synched to visual cuts. At the moment the spaceship jumps to hyperspace (0:41), Peter Schilling’s song cuts back in.

So here we have the premise of the series: these four kids getting lost in outer space and trying to find their way home. Disembarking on some alien planet, and in search of food, we cut to musical silence at 0:52 as Wim interacts with a fast food vendor (who happens to speak English). Music returns at 0:57 but now it is at half-speed, with on-the-beat accents mimicking electronic alarms, along with big drums.

The kids are shepherded to safety and onto another spaceship by Jod Na Nawood (Jude Law) at 1:02. Then strangely, at 1:06, sung vocals enter the mix, but it isn’t Peter Schilling singing his song in the original German, and it’s not English either. Instead, the vocals here appear to have been rerecorded in some Star Wars alien dialect, and by 1:16 these alien lyrics are set to the melody of Schilling’s chorus!

For the remainder of the trailer, a crew of pirates and droids give chase while, across the universe, the parents try to locate their kids. Accordingly, the music grows in momentum, layers of synths and vocals are added, but there is a lot of dialogue for the audience to catch, so the music is accordingly positioned in the background.

Bringing child protagonists into the Star Wars canon is presumably an effort to attract a new generation of Star Wars fans. The trailer editors have made clever use here of a playful and quirky 1980s synth track harkening back to the era of the first Star Wars films. The new vocal recording of an alien translation of this pop song is a brilliant touch.

Skeleton Crew arrives on DisneyPlus on December 3rd.

— Jack Hui Litster