Disney+-Exclusive 'Lego Star Wars' Bringing Holiday Sampling To YouTube
A happy Life Day, and an anticipated happy Chanukah and merry Christmas to all from the Force
It’s a belated Life Day miracle! Star Wars is taking a pair of Lego productions out from behind the Disney+ paywall for the Christmas season. 2020’s The Lego Star Wars Holiday Special was brought to YouTube on November 27 and this year’s four-episode miniseries Lego Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy will join it on December 5 for a limited time. They can be found on the Star Wars Kids channel.
Needling the infamous 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special, including to the extent that the Lego special premiered on the 32nd anniversary of it, The Lego Star Wars Holiday Special was the first major piece of Star Wars media set after The Rise of Skywalker. It’s another Life Day celebration back on Kashyyk that sees Rey struggle to train Finn as a Jedi. Discovering an ancient key that allows her to travel through time, she stumbles upon iconic franchise characters and moments that help her learn the importance of friendship and family. Rey, Finn, nor Poe find themselves voiced by Daisy Ridley, John Boyega or Oscar Isaac. Rebuild the Galaxy sees young nerf-herder Sig Greebling discover an ancient Jedi relic that rewrites reality. This artifact does such severe damage that it creates such situations as Jedi Vader, Darth Jar Jar, a version of Luke Skywalker who never left Tatooine and more. It’s up to Sig with the help of a forgotten Jedi to fix and yeah, rebuild this warped galaxy. It stars Gaten Matarazzo as Sig, as well as Tony Revolori and Marsai Martin. Both productions feature Kelly Marie Tran and Billy Dee Williams reprising their roles as Rose and Lando, at least some version of themselves in the latter, which also has Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker. In fact many actors reprise their roles from previous media in the franchise in at least one of the two.
The relationship between Lego and the Star Wars franchise goes all the way back to 1998, the year between the original trilogy special editions and the release of the first prequel The Phantom Menace. When Lego started branching out into television, Star Wars was making its way back too, with Genndy Tartakovsky’s Clone Wars microseries on Cartoon Network. An 8 year relationship would begin with Lego Star Wars: Revenge of the Brick in May 2005 as a Revenge of the Sith tie-in. More specials would air in a period where Cartoon Network was home to the CG The Clone Wars series headed by Dave Filoni.
After Disney bought the Star Wars franchise a month after Lego Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Out aired, it would become clear that the boy-aimed Disney XD would become a haven for much of Star Wars television as a whole before Disney+ launched, with not only several Lego miniseries, but a full-length longform series Lego Star Wars: The Freemaker Adventures. Developed in part by Bill Motz and Bob Roth, who would go on to create The Ghost and Molly McGee, The Freemaker Adventures ran with 22-minute runtimes for two seasons and 26 episodes. Star Wars Resistance was the last Star Wars series in general before it all moved behind Disney+, and the Disney Jr. series Young Jedi Adventures has been the only real crawl back out since. It’s to the point that ever since it premiered, clips, shorts, and compilations from that series have become the dominant output of the Star Wars Kids YouTube channel where The Lego Star Wars Holiday Special and Rebuild the Galaxy expand their reach.
Source: Star Wars