What About Neel?

In a turbulent age, is it enough to just be a funny blue elephant guy?

So, uh - I’ll just be honest: I haven’t had much to say, as of late. On much of anything, really. During October, I had a lot of fun covering some lesser-known encounters with high strangeness and exploring some more well-known ones more in-depth, and while there’s no shortage of other such cases I’d like to cover in the future, I don’t really want to pigeon-hole myself into one topic. Unfortunately, there really hasn’t been much else going on this November that has captured my attention. Or, well, maybe there has been -

You can hear the music, can’t you?

But, if you’re anything like me, you’re probably ready to talk and/or about something else. But… what else is there to talk about at the moment? I mean, you guys don’t really strike me as the type who want to talk about, like, football. Though, I will tell you -

If you know, you know.

If you’re a fellow Philly fan… this season ain’t been half-bad, has it? And, I do extend both my most sincere gratitude and solemn condolence to fans of the New York Giants - all two of them who haven’t abandoned the team, I suppose - for making it possible; it couldn’t have been done without your sacrifice. I know, I know - it stings, but… it’s been for a good cause¹.

The rest of the cultural landscape is… well, it’s not looking so hot. To inspect the landscape of American pop culture at present is to lay one’s gaze upon a blasted and barren, cratered and cursed hellscape.

If you look carefully, you can see the barest rumor of the corpse of Charli XCX’s Brat hype floating face-down in the tepid bog-water.

Currently, one name is sucking all the oxygen out of the room as, after decades of lingering in production Hell, much to the chagrin of aggrieved husbands and boyfriends across the country, the film adaptation of the Broadway musical, Wicked, finally lurches into theaters.

I’m gonna be real with you - it looks like shit. I remember when I saw the trailer for the first time, like, one Super Bowl ago, and I actually laughed and asked one of my friends, Who would want to see that?

Not because I don’t understand why people would want to watch a movie adaptation of Wicked; it’s the second-most profitable Broadway musical ever staged, so, yeah, there’s gonna be an audience for it. Hell, I’ll be completely transparent with you - I don’t even hate Wicked. The musical, I mean. It’s never been a particular favorite of mine, I could take it or leave it, but I might be cajoled into seeing a cinematic adaptation of it… if it didn’t look like a noisy, ugly, cluttered CGI fuck-fest. Also if it wasn’t needlessly split into two parts, the first of which runs on for a grinding two hours and forty fucking minutes. Look, I may have iPad Baby-Brain syndrome, but long movies are not verboten for me… provided they have a justifiable reason to be two hours and forty minutes long. Which, I can tell you with some confidence, the first act of Wicked does not need to be. You could condense the entire stage-play into a movie of that length, but, naturally, in the post-Marvel Cinematic Universe world, where studios have decided that everything as to be some sprawling, interconnected, multi-part epic saga (even as the dwindling box office returns for the most recent Marvel projects imply audiences taste for these is waning), even Wicked has to be an agonizingly drawn-out, multi-chapter affair. If it makes the money box office gurus are predicting it will, I’m telling you now - brace yourself for a three-part spin-off about Glinda the Good Witch, and a stand-alone project about a plucky flying monkey who decides that he wants to be a fashion designer, or something.

Also, the fact that the movie is headlined by a pop star I’ve always found rather grating and, more importantly, quite possibly the least-likeable leading actresses in Hollywood at present is not convincing me I need to dye my skin green, don a witch's hat, and ride my broom to the midnight premier.

Apparently, there are a lot of people who are that excited for the film. Like, really excited.

I think leading lady Cynthia Erivo’s very public hissy fit over an edit made by a Wicked fan to the dog-shit movie poster has earned her the well-deserved dubious honor of Least Likeable Actress of 2024.

The post she made in question - not included are the dozens of interviews in which she continued to dig the sinkhole she’d opened up even deeper.

Keep in mind, it was a fan-made edit she was dragging up and down social media. She laid a fan of the musical, someone who was excited about the film, who just (rightfully) thought the movie poster would benefit if it resembled the musical's book cover a little bit more, she laid on blast for the entire world to see. Classy, right?

But, we’ll shelve that for now. If I can find a copy of the novel that Wicked is based on that has the original cover art and not the bland, ugly, uninspired new “art” (I use that term as lightly as I possibly can) featuring Ariana Grande and Erivo… well, let’s just say this isn’t the last time we’ll be speaking about Wicked on this publication.

The only reason Erivo wasn’t exactly a shoo-in for the aforementioned accolade of being Hollywood’s most insufferably conceited, bloviating narcissist was solely because she was up against competition stiffer than a ramrod.

Though her penchant for tacky and gaudy septum piercings that look more fit to be worn by a homosexual orc than a person certainly speaks volumes of her lack of taste, Rachel Zegler is still flouncing around the entertainment media circuit, proving that she is effectively incapable of opening her mouth without jamming her foot squarely inside of it. After single-handedly torpedoing Disney’s ill-fated Snow White live-action adaptation by acting as a perpetual-motion engine of bad press for the past, oh - two fucking years, Zegler once again stole headlines across many a tabloid rag when she posted a screed against incoming President, Donald Trump. While she was far from the only celebrity to show her ass on social media in the aftermath of the election, her small manifesto was as brain-dead as it was incendiary, and once again thrust the imperiled Snow White project back into the odious spotlight of public critique.

Like Erivo, Zegler has issued a mealy-mouthed non-apology that next to no one is delusional enough to think is sincere.

Needless to say, Zegler’s antics mixed with yet another lackluster showing from Disney’s production personnel have proved to be a potent and unpalatable concoction; the movie’s first trailer has finally been released, again, I must stress, after two years of hand-wringing, delays, re-shoots and tweaking, to a reception that could generously be defined as frosty. One former Disney Imagineer described it as unwatchable. With Forbes Magazine predicting the movie will need to gross over $340 million dollars at the box office just to break even, I think it’s safe to say that, if Zegler’s bastardization of Snow White ever does limp into theaters, it’ll do so as a zombie; this thing is already dead, and won’t get any fresher on arrival.

Of course, I’m not just trying to beat up on the lady-folk, here. Rest assured there have been just as many male celebrities hitting the self-destruct button on their public reputations, lately. Half the cast of various Star Trek projects from over the years have been collectively going insane on social media, with Strange New World’s Anson Mount taking home the gold above the rest in a particularly puzzling and bizarre series of incendiary tweets.

Of course, this little recap of thoroughly detestable celebrities and their controversies wouldn’t be complete without mentioning one from another pop culture monolith with the word Star in it’s title.

You hear the words entitled and fans a lot in the entertainment media these days. God forbid, but if you engage with the putrefying corpse that is the Star Wars franchise or the Marvel Cinematic Universe as it falls apart one nut and one bolt at a time, well, first of all - seek professional help - but I also know you’ve heard the term entitled fans, as well. Pretty much every time a half-baked project under those banners is shat out of the House of Mouse and burns a couple hundred million bucks, you can expect at least one of the bigger names involved in the project’s misguided creation will sit down with the press to lay the blame at the feet of entitled fans. It’s so commonplace I genuinely think you might be able to devise a calculation with which it can be reliably predicted, like an eclipse, or something.

A great, if not perfectly archetypal example so indicative of the phenomenon it should probably be Exhibit A in a scholarly text examining it, came in the aftermath of Disney’s The Acolyte. Given that it was a Star Wars series releasing on Disney+, it was doomed from the word go to be subpar. We all knew it would crash and burn in spectacular fashion, as practically every Star Wars project on Disney+ has; the real question is who among the ship of fools that drove it nose-first into the dirt would come out to finger-wag the fans for being entitled?

Lead actress Amandla Stenberg² would take the thankless task upon her with enthusiasm.

Even before the show came out, she was already deploying the usual talking points about racism, sexism, and all the other increasingly ineffectual bits of libel to paint anyone who might have a problem with the show as a bigot. You see, Stenberg changes her gender identity and sexuality as frequently as a hypochondriac washes their hands; in January of 2016, she was bisexual. In February, she was pansexual. By March, she was pansexual, and then, come 2018, she was gay. If the current trajectory holds, I imagine she’ll make a full loop around the LGBTQIA+ circuit and arrive back at being a straight, cisgender woman by the end of the decade. But, naturally, as a gender chameleon, if you had beef with The Acolyte, this could logically be extrapolated as having a violent dislike of anyone who identifies as anything other than straight and cisgender. Well, that was her logic. I’m not sure the logic pans out for anyone with more than two brain cells, but I digress.

While the series came out, she had the audacity to release a fucking diss track, squarely aimed at the haters. Yes, really. I didn’t listen to it, I won’t listen to it unless I’m paid enough to purchase a McLaren Solus GT in cash, but I did find this line in a press piece on the track, which really tells anyone anything they need to know about it.

They spinning WOKE, bastardize it and appropriate it/Last I recall, WOKE was something we created, speak truth to power, keep an eye out for you silly racists. And now they use it to describe anything they threatened by/Remember when Gambino put it in the zeitgeist?”

Silly racists. Man - that cuts deep. What are you going to call them next? Goofy? Doo-doo heads? Bozo?

Personally, I think it sounds like shit, and I only read the lyrics. There’s a lot of rappers who could probably successfully deploy zeitgeist as a rhyme, but I don’t think Stenberg is one of them.

When one of the biggest tracks of the entire year is Kendrick Lamar single-handedly destroying Drake’s³ career overnight by dropping a song in which he outright calls him a certified pedophile, I’m afraid calling Redditors - sorry, ‘racists’ silly is not going to qualify as a diss track.

Stenberg’s non-existent bar-dropping skills aside, when news hit that The Acolyte would thankfully not be renewed for a second season despite ending with one of the most aggressively transparent sequel hooks seen in the history of media, she took to social media to upload nearly ten minutes of a rambling screed that was so poorly received even Redditors on r/Starwars, who normally spin apologetics for these sorts of things, were calling it a bad look.

Now, Star Wars has been circling the metaphorical drain for… when did The Force Awakens come out? Right - 2015. So, for a whole decade now, Disney has been completely unable to figure out how to make more than one half-way decent project with the franchise. It really shouldn’t be that hard, yet, at the same time, it’s not particularly surprising; they’ve had the Muppets franchise under their purview for even longer than Star Wars, and it’s blatantly clear that they have no idea what to do with it, either⁴.

I will give them credit - Rogue One was… well, I wouldn’t call it good, but it was entertaining. So, naturally, they shit-canned director Gareth Edwards and made sure he’d never do anything else with the franchise again, presumably so Dave Filoni can keep churning out tasteless memberberry sludge and retcon every corner of canon to make his perfect original the character (do not steal) waifu Asokha Tano the single most important person in the entirety of the Star Wars universe.

But, if you think the future for the Galaxy Far, Far Away is bleak… if all hope seems lost for this once venerable pillar of American pop culture… I must insist that you mustn’t lose hope. Keep the faith. For a savior for the Star Wars galaxy, if not all of Disney, and perhaps American pop culture, draws near.

Or, perhaps I should say… draws Neel.

Behold - Neel.

Who is Neel?

Fuck if I know. I just know the little bugger has been popping up all over social media as the most integral piece of the marketing blitz Disney has been conducting for yet another Star Wars Disney+ series called Star Wars: Skeleton Crew.

Haven’t heard of it? Yeah, I hadn’t either up until a month or so ago, when I guess Disney remembered they had it on their docket and had to rush to spread the word that yet another disappointing failure is soon to splatter across their streaming service like fresh, hot bird droppings. Maybe that’s uncharitable, but given their track record for these things so far, even someone with even the vaguest semblance of pattern-recognition abilities has to admit that, almost a dozen of Disney’s previous efforts to put Star Wars on Disney+ have been either not good or bad, it stands to reason that this outing won’t buck the trend.

I will say that Dave Filoni is not affiliated with the project. At least, not in a major way. I’m sure he’ll manage to worm his grubby little fingers into it somehow and pollute it with his proprietary trash, but the series is being directed by John Watts, who helmed the (mostly) competent Spider-Man movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and John Ford, who wrote them. Then again, one must still be wary - former Harvey Weinstein assistant Leslye⁵ Headland (yes, really) was a fresh face who spearheaded The Acolyte, and we see how that ended. Even a competent and consummate filmmaker like Robert Rodriguez was hamstrung by red tape and corporate politicking within Lucasfilm when he oversaw The Book of Boba Fett, which I’m sure is partially responsible why one of the most promising projects of the Disney Star Wars era into a glorified commercial for Baby Yoda.

Apparently, Jon Favreau - the only sane man in LucasFilm’s employ - wanted to keep Baby Yoda out of both The Book of Boba Fett and The Mandalorian so that they could, y’know, be about Boba Fett and the Mandalorian, but unfortunately, Dave Filoni and Kathleen Kennedy, in all their wisdom, mandated otherwise. So, the little bastard got shoe-horned in literally less than a full season after being written out of the show so they could sell more merch with his bug-eyed mug plastered on it - even if sales of Baby Yoda swag have, apparently, been declining since at least 2022.

It seems as if they’re attempting to capture that same lightning in a bottle they did with Baby Yoda with Skeleton Crew’s Neel. Next to no information about any of the other characters have been revealed. Even the ostensible lead, played by Jude Law, is pretty much a mystery save for his incredibly silly name, Jod Na Nawood.

Pretty soon, I’m fairly sure that there actually will be a character named Glup Shitto that turns up in one of these things.

Anyways, rather than bank on Jude Law’s name recognition, they’re leaning hard on people being enamored with Neel for no other reason than he’s a quirky and ostensibly cute blue alien that everyone says looks like an elephant⁶, and also another Muppets Babies-esque version of a familiar Star Wars character. When I say that they’re being transparent about trying to ape the Baby Yoda trick again, I mean they’re being shameless.

Real Star Wars oldheads will remember this fellow from Return of the Jedi.

If you, like me, were not obsessed with Star Wars as a child, and didn’t read all the ancillary material pertinent to the setting, you might not know this dumpy, warty, goggle-eyed freak is named Max Rebo. Even though he only appeared briefly as a member of the band in Jabba the Hutt’s palace, jamming out on a futuristic keyboard with his stubby little-suckered fingers like an alien Billy Joel, he, like so many other background characters in the original films, struck a chord with the audience because of his striking appearance. Like every other background character, he also got scads of lore written about him. Apparently, he’s actually the front-man for the giant space slug’s favorite musical outfit, creatively titled The Max Rebo Band, and they play Jizz music. Seriously. Also, apparently his hands are just for show, and he plays the organ with his feet. And, don’t worry, Jizzheads - when Jabba’s barge went up in flames, Max and his crew managed to scurry out in one piece… somehow.

He turned up in the Book of Boba Fett, where he was playing a gig at another seedy establishment that also ended up getting leveled in a fiery inferno.

“Ladies and gentle-aliens - this is Rebo #5.”

Poor dude can’t catch a break, can he? If I were him, I’d start looking for a new agent. Again - according to ancillary sources, Rebo managed to shuffle out of the ensuing carnage unscathed. No word on his butt-headed pal on the guitar, though.

Anyways, it’s pretty obvious that Neel does not belong to the same species as Max Rebo.

To be honest, I like Neel’s design. I’m sure I’ll begin to hate it if he becomes as ubiquitous as Baby Yoda, but for now, I believe that he has very kind eyes.

He’s already taller than Rebo, he has a little mop of hair, his eyes are a little bit less soulless, and his fingers end with nails rather than nasty, sucking holes. In interviews, John Watts has repeatedly stressed that Neel is not an Ortolan - which is Rebo’s species.

It’s a big galaxy. There’s a lot of blue, trunked, elephant creatures out there.

It’s a very hollow attempt to convince onlookers that Disney’s isn’t blatantly attempting to spark another Baby Yoda craze. Which they are.

The show is still, as of this writing, about a week away from premiering, but long before this point LucasFilm has been keen to let anyone and everyone who will listen - and a lot of us who don’t want to - that piping hot Neel swag is fresh out of the Indonesian sweat-shops and ready for display on the shelf of your gooncave. Sorry - man-cave.

Get ‘em while they’re hot!

And, yes, they have already revealed merchandise for all the other characters, as well, but I have yet to see either the media, Disney, or fans talk about the little Asian girl who might as well be Baby Lobot.

Yeah. You remember Lobot, don’t you? This guy? From Cloud City in The Empire Strikes Back?

I guess it just doesn’t have the same appeal when it’s a weird, dead-eyed cyborg man with no ears versus a warty, dumpy little blue elephant dude. Sorry, Lobot.

Anyways, they’re banking hard on Neel’s cute-factor to shoulder the brunt of this project’s burden, and move some plastic tchotchkes, as well. That’s not in question. But what is debatable is whether or not it’s working.

The answer is… kind of? In my research, I’ve seen some hyperbolic puff-pieces written by people who may or may not be getting some Disney cheddar on the side to hype the project up, but it isn’t the veritable media inferno that Baby Yoda sparked.

Would you? Would you really?

It seems as if the ever-dwindling Star Wars fanbase’s reaction has been tepid, at best. Not just to Neel, but Skeleton Crew as a whole. This may well be because of Neel; Disney’s marketing has given very little for the notoriously lore-hungry, eager egg-gobbling Star Wars fandom to sink their teeth in aside from Neel. In the lead up to the series’ debut, what do they really have to speculate or talk about other than… well, Neel?

If you couldn’t tell, I’m not the biggest fan of Baby Yoda. Frankly, I think the character’s been a detriment to the franchise as a whole; pretty much guaranteed that it would never get the dramatic reworking it needed because they had at least one thing going for them, and that was selling truck-loads of Baby Yoda merchandise. Filoni and Kennedy thusly shoe-horned him into places that he didn’t need to be, effectively making every series that takes place during the Mandalorian-era⁷ into Baby Yoda: The Show, guest-starring the Mandalorian, Boba Fett, and others.

But I do understand why Baby Yoda worked. As a marketable character, I mean. To be honest, I didn’t come to loathe the character like I do until he became literally inescapable. Much like the ever-loathable Minions of Illumination Entertainment’s Despicable Me franchise, the sheer over-exposure of the character instilled within me a violent, knee-jerk reaction whenever I see them. Bumper stickers. Christmas sweater. Backpacks. I saw a grown woman carrying a life-size Baby Yoda doll around in a papoose in Portland not that long ago, which was probably only the third most bizarre sight to grace my eyes while visiting the Rose City. You can’t get away from the little fucker, and if I ever see him in the wild again, it’ll be all too soon.

That aside… I get it. The character is, ostensibly, cute. He was meticulously, scientifically calculated by a crack team of Disney-hired scientists to be quite possibly one of the cutest character designs in recent memory. In the first season of The Mandalorian, before he overstayed his welcome, he was even a bit charming.

But he was also a surprise.

It may be difficult to remember, what with the fact his little green mug has been permanently seared into most of our retinas from being literally everywhere, but Baby Yoda was nowhere to be seen in the build-up to The Mandalorian’s much-anticipated debut. He was a secret. His reveal in the first episode was a legitimate shock for a lot of different reasons. It got people talking. It got people excited. The media frenzy around the little bugger probably spurred a not-insignificant amount of people who were apathetic about The Mandalorian to give it a watch, if only so they could stay up to date on the hottest thing in the zeitgeist. One of the reasons Baby Yoda merch moved like it did was the fact that there wasn’t any when the show premiered. LucasFilm kept the secret of Baby Yoda so close to their chest that they specifically opted not to produce merchandise until after the big reveal as they rightly presumed that, like everything these days, information about the toys would leak well in advance. So, people were clamoring for merchandise featuring the character, there wasn’t any, and it took Disney months to kick production into gear. Even when they did, there were shortages of it because it was in such high demand.

It was a bold and, frankly, ingenious marketing move that was so successful that I can only imagine that Disney, being as pathologically averse to success as they seem to be, fired the minds responsible for the strategy afterwards.

If they’re trying to reignite similar fervor for Neel, I don’t think propping him up as the one and only thing about Skeleton Crew worth talking about is going to do the trick. Who knows - maybe there isn’t anything else about Skeleton Crew worth showing off.

If there’s anything about the lead-up to Skeleton Crew’s release that caught my attention, it’s how it came very close to not getting it at all. Compared to The Acolyte, which people had been yammering about since it was first announced in December 2020 and all the way up to it’s graceless release on Disney+ in the summer of 2024, there’s exceedingly little media fanfare surrounding it, and seemingly even less fan excitement. There just aren’t that many people who seem interested in talking about it.

Why? The answer is pretty obvious - there’s no controversy about it. When The Last Jedi released in 2017, the discourse and fandom around Star Wars shifted tectonically and irrevocably. It became very ugly. Director Rian Johnson set a precedent that many creatives at LucasFilm have since turned into a grand tradition by mocking, belittling, and generally antagonizing fans, both on social media and through the conventional press avenues. While I will always say that I think the Star Wars fandom is… well, very prone to overreaction, and they could have played their own cards better, there's still a power imbalance between the audience and director that made Johnson look like a petulant school yard bully who'd broken the nerdy kid's favorite toy and now gloating about them being upset about it. It wasn't a good look, and it's left a taint behind that the franchise has been unable to shake ever since.

In the ensuing years, Star Wars has devolved from perhaps the preeminent science fiction franchise in the cultural zeitgeist to a nasty quagmire of grinding, endless cultural warfare. Almost every project following The Last Jedi has been mired in nasty controversy, and many of the creatives who helmed them proved to be even more antagonistic and vicious than Rian Johnson ever did - see Stenberg's aforementioned public meltdown, which dragged on for months. To be fair, the other side wasn’t representing themselves much better, what with slobbering man-children bellowing about the wokeness in front of their Funko Pop shrines and grifters spinning absurd conspiracy theories about secret anti-woke freedom fighters within LucasFilm valiantly struggling against the tyranny of God-Queen Kathleen Kennedy that came one Trust The Plan short of being the Disney-equivalent of QAnon. I’ll always say that I understand why these people were upset, as I have no love for political partisans using popular intellectual properties as skin-suits from within which they can finger wag the public on white privilege or some such, but they certainly weren’t presenting themselves very well.

The HeelvsBabyface meltdown over pronouns in a mediocre Bethesda game is still the gold standard for how not to respond to this kind of silliness.

In the end, this toxic cycle ended up driving away anyone who wasn’t either a cultural crusader, regardless of what side they came down on, or the last remnants of die-hard Star Wars fan who are so deep in the hole that the sunk cost fallacy dictates that they’ll never be able to abandon the metaphorical Galactic Starcruiser from Hell. Part of this is because your average Joe Blow has little patience for cultural warfare; they may have their sympathies that lean from one side to the other, but ultimately have better things to do with their time than engage in internet flame-wars on Reddit and YouTube. You know. Like full-time employment. And car payments. At the end of the day, they just want to tune in, tune out, and turn off to some space opera cheese, not sit through a lecture on gender studies.

Part of this is simply because very little of what Disney has put out has been worth watching, full stop. If they had been pumping out quality entertainment on par with the original Star Wars trilogy, or even the prequels, more people would have stuck around in spite of the infighting. After all, people were willing to forgive a lot of LucasFilm and Disney’s misgivings when it came to The Mandalorian during the first two seasons, but when the third season of the show was widely agreed to be much inferior to its predecessors, not even trotting out Baby Yoda again was going to save it from floundering.

Simply put, if you aren’t the type of person who gets their jollies bickering with Redditors, or don’t have the Rebel insignia inked somewhere on your body, Star Wars doesn’t have much to offer. In fact, all it seems to offer any more is drama, controversy, and general nastiness. Naturally, the only people left who really care about Star Wars are the people who indulge in that, whether they be hyper-liberal progressives, or part of the cottage industry that sprung up on YouTube like a fungal outbreak of anti-woke partisans who have generated a small fortune bitching about them.

Given that both sides thrive on controversy and conflict, what happens when a Star Wars project like Skeleton Crew pops up that hasn’t been fermenting in piss and vinegar for the entirety of its production? What happens when there isn’t months, if not years, worth of negative bad press tailing behind it? What happens when the creatives, like John Watts and Chris Ford, just seem to be quiet workmen who showed up and did their job, and actors like Jude Law keep their mouths shut and their boots away from the nests of hornets that others like Cynthia Erivo, Anson Mount, and Rachel Zegler just can’t help but kick when they purposefully antagonizing the very people who want to and would see their films?

Well - if anything of the people still hunkered down in the craters and foxholes littering the battlefield Star Wars became do still care about the well-being of the franchise they claim to love, they don’t show it. Because, at this point, the wars and stars is not what they’re looking forward to when a new Star Wars project is announced. They’re just there for the conflict. They’re still spoiling for a fight. The progressive culture warriors want the project to be purposefully incendiary, loaded with progressive themes and ideology, to spite the chuds. The other side doesn’t want the project to be neutral, or even that good - if it is, they have nothing to stir up outrage and generate clicks from.

It’s fascinating to me that, for all the woe is me lamentations from both of these sides where they whine, All we want is good Star Wars!, when a project that seems to be just that - bog-standard, bare-bones, no-frills Star Wars - actually comes up on the docket… it’s all crickets.

The only people who seem to care about Star Wars: Skeleton Crew is, perhaps ironically, perhaps befittingly, the scant Skeleton Crew of truly impartial fans of the franchise; the battered wives of the fandom who have tolerated all this nonsense the whole time, either uncritically consuming the slop Disney and LucasFilm has been throwing into the trough, or patiently waiting for a new Star Wars project that is… well, just good ol’ fashioned Star Wars. And, in a way, I think that’s what Neel represents. He’s not being touted as some win for diversity or representation. He’s not being reviled as another token shoe-horned into the series for brownie points from the Progressive Bloc. He’s not a lightning rod for controversy.

He’s just a funny little guy. There was a time where they might have been enough, but the current prospects are bleak, both for Star Wars, the entertainment, and American pop culture as a whole.

Will Star Wars: Skeleton Crew prove to be a repeat of The Mandalorian’s early success? Will it be yet one more failure in a seemingly endless conga-line of disappointments from the Star Wars brand? Most importantly - will Neel be the shot in the arm the franchise needs to win back those that turned away from the brand? Will the series even be good?

I suppose that the real question might be that, even if it is… is anyone going to care?

1. Look, man - I know it’s unfashionable to be a sports fans, but sometimes, I like to eat my lightly toasted sourdough bread while watching the clowns of the circus beat the living shit out of each other in the arena.

2. And, yes, it is Amandla, not Amanda.

3. For those out of the now, Aubrey Drake “Drizzy” Graham of Toronto, Canada has been one of the most culturally important figures in rap. To so thoroughly demolish such a powerful and influential rapper’s career, and so publicly, is no mean feat for Lamar to pull off.

4. The answer is, again, shocking simple. Remember The Muppet Christmas Carol and Muppet Treasure Island? Just find another Victorian-era classic novel, write some catchy tunes, and slap the Muppets in it. Easy.

5. Is it Les-lee? Or Les-lie.?

6. Personally, I think he looks more like a tapir, but whatever.

7. Officially known as the New Republic Era in the canon.