The following contains minor spoilers for the first two episodes of Star Wars: Skeleton Crew.
I’ve been looking forward to using my Disney+ subscription to see Skeleton Crew ever since seeing the first preview of it back at D23 over the summer. It looked like fun; a simple, but enjoyable show that would send a group of kids on a galaxy-hopping adventure. It’s the sort of premise for a Star Wars series that seems so obvious now, you wonder why it took so long to get here.
As CinemaBlend’s resident theme park expert and Disney historian, the first two episodes of Skeleton Crew were especially good. Not only is the series so far a lot of fun, but these episodes contained two different references to classic Disneyland attractions. One of them was, obviously, a Star Wars ride, but the other, interestingly, was not.
Star Tours RX-24 Is Driving the School Bus On Skeleton Crew
If you went on Star Tours at Disneyland or Walt Disney World from when it first opened back in 1987, to when it closed over a decade ago, then you may have recognized the most obvious of the two theme park easter eggs when it appeared in the first episode of Skeleton Crew. An early scene shows two of our main characters taking the bus to school, and that bus is driven by a droid, one that looks remarkably like RX-24, the pilot of the original Star Tours.
RX-24 (Rex) was voiced by Paul Reubens on Star Tours. He was a droid that had only recently been commissioned to pilot Star Tours flights. As such, he doesn’t really know what he’s doing and he makes a lot of mistakes.
Rex was replaced by C-3PO when Star Tours received a major overhaul a decade ago. However, Rex lives on, complete with the voice of Paul Reubens, as the DJ of Oga’s Cantina at Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge. The bus driver in Skeleton Crew has a different voice since Paul Reubens passed away last year, so he’s probably not supposed to be an identical model of droid, but they are clearly, and intentionally, similar.
However, the wildest easter egg connected to a Disney park came in the next episode.
Is Captain EO Part Of The Star Wars Universe?
In Episode 2 of Skeleton Crew, the kids find themselves inside a pirate hideout. While exploring the place, one of the children discovers a stall selling various exotic creatures in cages. One of them might look familiar to you if you remember the other Disneyland attraction that was produced by George Lucas and directed by Francis Ford Coppola in the late ‘80s: the musical 3D movie, Captain EO.
This is Fuzzball… or more likely it’s a creature of the same species as Fuzzball, a small flying alien who is one of Captain EO’s crew in the short film that starred Michael Jackson and originally ran at Disneyland from 1986 until 1998. Needless to say that as a Disney Parks fan and a Star Wars fan, this raises a lot of questions.
Is Captain EO taking place in the same universe as Star Wars? I need to know. George Lucas did co-write and produce Captain EO, so the two projects are related in that way at least. Did George Lucas conceive that his musical sci-fi story was connected to his magnum opus?
I haven’t seen the film in about a decade (it briefly returned to Disneyland and Epcot following Michael Jackson’s death in 2010), but it was one of the attractions that was running on my very first Disneyland vacation ever, so it holds a special place in my heart.
I feel like the mental gymnastics that would need to be done to make Star Wars and Captain EO truly fit together would be quite significant, and I’m not sure it would work. Still, I would love to see Disney do something with Captain EO again, so if this is the beginning of that, I am seated.