Lego Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy has been delighting fans of all ages since it’s release!
Previous to it’s premiere, I had the chance to speak with the writers and creators behind the series, Dan Hernandez and Benji Samit, to discuss the balance in celebrating all the eras of Star Wars properly, the ideas behind the twist on certain characters, and their motivation with the story.
When it came balancing all the Star Wars trilogies, Samit shared, “It was a long process of winnowing down to what we wound up with. At first, as you could probably imagine, when we first started writing this thing, we wanted to get every character, every ship, every planet, everything, every creature that we possibly could, because we’re just such massive Star Wars and LEGO Star Wars fans. But we only had four 22 minute episodes. They had to tell us to stop. We couldn’t squeeze it all in. So what ended up happening is we kind of had to focus in on the things that best served the story that we were trying to tell.”
Hernandez chimed in, “We had access to the entire swath of Star Wars history, so we did feel like we wanted to represent as much as we could in in this because I do think that it’s meaningful to see things that we grew up with the original trilogy. But there’s a lot of people whose first exposure Star Wars was the prequels, and there’s a lot of people whose first exposure was the sequels or the Clone Wars, or whatever it might have been. So we did also want to do enough that people say I feel like I’m seeing the thing that I love on screen and then figuring out organic ways to make it make sense with the bigger story that was being told.”
On the process behind creating the twist on certain beloved Star Wars characters, Samit said, “There were some that preceded us, in terms of idea. Like Darth Jar Jar, for instance, has been a fan theory for years and years and years. And just as fans would talk about it, it’s just a fun thought experiment. But when we found ourselves writing this and rebuilding the galaxy, it was like a light bulb moment early on where we’re like, ‘Wait a second, this might be the only chance ever to actually do Darth Jar Jar.’ And so something like that was very quick and easy to know we wanted to do that. Other characters would be like, we know we want to, to have a villain that turns out to be good, like, who would be the best one to fit in here. It was just a slow process of like, what fit each moment.”
Hernandez added, “As much as possible, we tried to make it built out of the story that was being told, and not just make it a series of memes or a series of, ‘Oh, I recognize that!’ Because there is a certain satisfaction in that, and we we certainly have a couple moments that are just for fun and funny stuff, but for any of the new, mixed up characters that we introduced that played a bigger part in the story, we really had to figure out where they fit within this rebuilt galaxy, their function, and by figuring out, sort of the underpinnings of who they are in this version of the galaxy, made it easier to write.”
Lastly, I asked Hernandez and Samit about the story and what it was like incorporating classic Star Wars themes and tropes while still creating an original story.
Hernandez said, “Thank you for asking about that, because to us, that is the the absolutely most critical element of the whole show is that brother relationship, and it was one that we really refined over time. But what we did know from the beginning is that we wanted to start on a sleepy planet of nerf herders and see nerf herders for the first time on screen, which is seems crazy, but it’s true that this is the first time we were actually seeing scruffy looking nerf herders. So we knew that we wanted to start there, and we also knew that one of the things that really excites us as writers is writing about the nature of the force, the light side, the dark side. Are you beyond redemption? Is anyone beyond redemption? These are the big, big questions of Star Wars. And so we said, well, it’s not enough just to say, in our world, Rey is good; in this world, she’s a Sith. That’s shocking in and of its own right, but it’s not personal to our main character in quite the same way. And so we said, well, the only way that it could really be personal is if that you went from a galaxy where there were someone that you loved, in this case, your brother, who you look up to, who you admire, who in any other version of this story, probably would be the hero of this story.”