‘Star Wars: Skeleton Crew’ exclusive photos reveal Jaleel White as space pirate

Argh, there be pirates! And we’ve got the photo to prove it.

Star Wars: Skeleton Crew will tell the tale of four children who discover a secret and then get into a series of adventures as they attempt find a way back to their home planet. And it seems their journey will pit them against some fearsome foes — namely, pirates.

Entertainment Weekly has the exclusive first look at these space pirates below (as well as another exclusive image of Jude Law’s Jod Na Nawood and the show’s four pint-sized heroes), and also spoke to Skeleton Crew creators Jon Watts and Christopher Ford about this potential hive of scum and villainy.

“Those are pirates!” confirms Ford of the photo subjects above. “Space pirates.”

And not just any space pirates, but that is none other than Urkel himself, Jaleel White, looking vaguely cyborg-esque as Gunter. To the left of Gunter is a pesky character Star Wars fans may recognize: the unsavory Vane (Marti Matulis), who gave Din Djarin and Greef Karga such a hard time on The Mandalorian. Rounding out this not-so-merry band of pirates to the right of Gunter is Brutus (voiced by Fred Tatasciore and played by performance artist Stephen Oyoung), Pax (performance artist: Mike Estes), and Chaelt (Orange is the New Black‘s Dale Soules).

With Skeleton Crew taking place in the same time frame as shows like The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, and Ahsoka — after the fall of the second Death Star, and before the rise of the First Order — that means that there is a lack of what one might call Imperial enforcement. Naturally, that allows nefarious forces to thrive. “With the era we’re in, we’re kind of getting to play with that lawless thing,” says Ford. “The Empire is gone, and so we’re playing with a part of the galaxy that has a resurgence of piracy.”

Pirates played a role in season 3 of The Mandalorian, as folks like Gorian Shard and Vane created chaos on Nevarro, and now it appears we will meet more unscrupulous characters of the same ilk. “Pirates are talked about so much in Star Wars,” Ford notes. “People would call Han Solo a pirate and he’d be like, ‘How dare you?’ And we’ve seen some awesome pirates in the animated shows. So this was something where both [executive producers] Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau were really excited to do more pirate stuff.”

Exploring the edges of wild space is something that co-creator Watts is excited to do, not just due to his love of Star Wars, but also because of his love of a certain LucasArts video game series that dates all the way back to 1990. “I’m also a big fan of Monkey Island,” says Watts. “That’s also classic Lucas. So somewhere between Star Wars pirates and Monkey Island pirates. I think we found our sweet spot.”

Finding the sweet spot was something Watts and Ford were looking to do for the series as a whole, as they created an entirely new world within the already pre-existing one of Star Wars — a world with certain rules that can’t be broken. “What’s great about working at Lucasfilm is that they’ll let you know if you’ve gone outside of the boundaries,” Watts says. “Dave Filoni is our goalkeeper.”

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And Watts means that literally of the creative visionary overseeing the Star Wars streaming galaxy. “He actually is a great hockey player, but he’s also a figurative goalkeeper. We will come up with ideas of things that we like, and then he’ll be like, ‘Actually, maybe it’s this.’ Or, ‘Oh, we already did something like that somewhere else.’ And you always end up with a bunch of other episodes of Star Wars to go watch and things to go read, and it’s good. You feel like you can safely explore things creatively without making some huge canonical mistake.”

Adds Ford: “And he gets both sides of that because he did that [mentoring under] George Lucas. So he gets that thing of, ‘I want to make a whole new kind of a Jedi,’ and then someone being like, ‘Okay, hold on. A lot of people have thought about this. Let’s do this the right way.’ And it’s so helpful.”

Even when it comes to pirates.

Star Wars: Skeleton Crew premieres Tuesday, Dec. 3, on Disney+.