LEGO Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy is here. And we could not more highly recommend that you watch it. In addition to being a perfect love letter to Star Wars and LEGO, the series brings hilarious inversions of our favorite Star Wars characters, gorgeous animation, and a rich poignancy. In celebration of the miniseries’ release, Nerdist spoke to writers Dan Hernandez and Benji Samit about the true meaning of the series. Hernandez and Samit broke down how they chose which Star Wars bits to include and gave a truly beautiful breakdown of LEGO Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy‘s ending. Truly, this series encapsulates some themes that will resonate with kids and adults.
You can check out our full LEGO Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy interview below.
Nerdist: This show is a true love letter to the Star Wars fandom. How did you decide what facets of lore to bring into the more official series like Jedi Bob and Darth Jar Jar, and how fun and or nerve-wracking was it to bring them to life?
Benji Samit: I mean, it was exceptionally fun and exciting to bring some of these things to life, and those two that you mentioned were right at the top of our list of things. From almost day one, we knew that we wanted to get in there. But we wanted to pick everything. It was not easy because we essentially took the bin of every Star Wars LEGO piece ever, dumped it on the ground, and got to build our own thing. I think the initial drafts were just way too long. We tried to get every character we love in, every creature, every ship, every planet. And eventually, they said, you got to stop.
This couldn’t be a 20-piece special. It had to be four pieces. So the way we really, at the end of the day, started winnowing things down and figuring out what we wanted to focus on was the stuff that really served the story we were trying to tell. It would’ve been very easy to start to turn this into something that was almost just like a series of sketches, just silly gags in the Star Wars world. And it would’ve been funny, but it would’ve probably gotten old pretty quickly. So it was important to us that at the core of this was a real Star Wars story. And so everything else that came around that was to serve that greater story.
Dan Hernandez: Yeah, I mean for me it really was about telling a story that is foundationally Star Wars. How can we do that while using all of the unique and incredible things about LEGO and LEGO Star Wars and the tone and the comedy of that. But also, I did ask myself, what aspects of Star Wars would I personally like to explore a little bit more? Who are the characters I’d like to spend a little bit more time with or explore if they had gone a different way?
Darth Rey is something that we see for a minute in the sequel trilogy, but we don’t spend a ton of time on that; that felt like something that was really provocative and really something I wanted to see more of, and who that evil version of Rey was. And it’s one thing to be nobody and decide to go on the right side of things, but it’s very different to see a world in which she didn’t do that. So that was something that I was excited to see.
It’s the same thing with Rose Tico, a character that I love, and a performance I love by Kelly Marie Tran, who is one of the most brilliant performers we’ve ever worked with. And to let her cut loose, to let her see her anger… In the Star Wars movies she leads with compassion, but she lost her sister. What if the bitterness of that infected her entire being? Her everything. And so it was things like that that were really fun for us. And that really informed a lot of the storytelling because once you sort of identified, okay, here’s a plausible reason that this character might have gone a different way, then you started to see where do they fit in a greater context of this mixed up galaxy.
We played with things like expectations, where Sig, who thinks he knows everything about “our galaxy,” sees Darth Maul in the new galaxy and immediately assumes, based on the way he looks and the way that he has acted, that he’s a bad guy and guess what? He’s the nicest guy in the world. So that was also interesting for us. There is a poignancy to say sort of letting go of what your expectations are of people, but also of what a Star Wars story might be or could be or who a character is or how they behave. And those were all of the things that excited us when we talked about how to recombine all of these different aspects of Star Wars.
I think that’s really beautiful and I think it really did come through one part of this series. I also thought that the ending of LEGO Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy was incredibly lovely and really well done, and it was kind of bittersweet in this way that few series are brave enough to attempt. You all said, here’s this ending where it’s not going to go back to the way it was, and maybe it never will. Did you know all along that was how it would play out?
Hernandez: I’m so glad that you pointed that out and asked that because it was one of the things that we both felt very passionately about. And the reason is that I think that’s how life is. I think that’s how life functions, which is you can be an expert on something, you can think that you’ve prepared for a situation, and then life throws something at you that you never could have anticipated, and you kind of have to deal with it. And so resetting the galaxy back to the way that it used to be felt a little bit like it would have been cheap, not how life is.
Things happen and the only thing that you can truly control is your response to it, whether you choose to move forward and try to find your own way in whatever the new circumstances are or if you find yourself held back by the way things used to be. And then you end up in a paralysis, you get bitter, you get angry. You’re stuck thinking, I wish things could have been the way that they used to be. And to us, we felt like it was a message for kids, of course, but also for adults to say there are things in this life that you can’t get back. You can’t make it go back to the way it used to be.
And specifically, in the case of Dev and Sig and that bittersweet ending that you were talking about, Sig never gives up hope. Not really. He believes that there is a piece of that brother that he used to know inside of this version of his brother. And I hope that the way that people feel at the end of the special is, “I’m not sure. I think maybe Sig is right, but we don’t know for sure.” But the reason that Sig is ultimately a hero is that he believes it and he’s willing to fight for that.
And ultimately, I think that the reason that Dev doesn’t strike him down is that on some deep level, that Dev maybe would never admit to, he hopes that too. And that also felt like a really powerful message that is very much in keeping with the spirit of redemption and keeping with the spirit of that people can fall into darkness, but they’re not beyond hope. That hope informs everything in the Star Wars galaxy.
Samit: And we also want it to be true to the spirit of LEGO itself, which is: you build something, sometimes you break it. But if your brother smashes your LEGO set, you can rebuild it. If it’s an original creation of yours and it gets smashed, you can rebuild it. But it’s probably going to be different. It’s never going to be exactly the same, but nothing is ever broken for good in the world of LEGO.
Other toys, model kits, this, that you break it and it’s broken. But the beautiful thing about LEGO is nothing is ever truly broken. It’s just broken down to its component parts and you put ’em back together however you want. And we wanted the series to feel like that.
All four parts of LEGO Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy are streaming now on Disney+.