The Big Picture

LEGO Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy
is a delightful LEGO Star Wars miniseries on Disney+.
Showrunners Dan Hernandez and Benji Samit discuss creating the 4-episode season.
The creative duo also reveal if Disney or Lucasfilm had any notes about their jokes and plotlines.

Last week, a delightful new Star Wars series dropped on Disney+, and it has the potential to become one of the most unanimously liked Star Wars series because it’s hard to dislike the adorable antics of LEGO figures. LEGO Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy is a four-episode miniseries, with a very open-ended finale, which sees the Star Wars galaxy flipped on its head as the good guys become the bad guys and the bad guys become the heroes.

Written by the creative duo Dan Hernandez and Benji Samit, Rebuild the Galaxy is a hero’s tale for the lowly nerf-herder Sig Greebling (Gaten Matarazzo), who finds himself thrown head-first into an epic battle of good versus evil after he unearths the “cornerstone,” a powerful artifact hidden within a long-forgotten Jedi temple. Luckily, he isn’t alone in his pursuit of saving the galaxy as Jedi Bob (Bobby Moynihan) becomes his (mostly) wise mentor and Yesi Scala (Marsai Martin) remains a stalwart friend and ally. Unfortunately, the only ally Sig doesn’t have in his newfound galaxy is his brother, and fellow nerf-herder Dev (Tony Revolori), who has fallen to the dark side.

Ahead of the premiere last week, I caught up with Dan Hernandez and Benji Samit to discuss their series. During our fun conversation, the duo discussed just how detail-oriented they have to be when constructing a world out of the iconic LEGO breaks, how one Jedi Bob flashback is an homage to the early days of the LEGO and Star Wars partnership, and the pair discussed whether Disney and Lucasfilm gave them guardrails with their various jests at the franchise. You can read the full transcript of the conversation with Tony Revolori, Gaten Matarazzo, and Marsai Martin below or watch it in the player above.

COLLIDER: When you are working with the LEGO universe, how important is the integrity of how LEGOs work? How much thought and intentionality goes into each building, each tree, each perfectly constructed horizon to ensure that they’re within the parameters of the real world figures?

BENJI SAMIT: Yes, so I’m a massive LEGO nerd. So, working on this, I wanted to make the LEGO as authentically LEGO as possible. And I was working hand-in-hand with actual LEGO company, it’s been amazing to do, because yeah, every LEGO build you see is a legal LEGO build, as they say. And yeah, figuring out which… A lot of the builds you see are real sets from well over all the different eras of LEGO Star Wars. And yeah, we wanted it to really feel in a lot of ways, like the classic stop-motion LEGO films that people just used to make on their own. I mean, you can find stop-motion LEGO Star Wars fan films from before LEGO Star Wars even existed as an official branded partnership. People just using regular LEGO minifigs to make these stop-motion things. And so there’s a charm to the stop-motion and to the limitations of the minifig and the limitation of some of these ships and the way things can move and interact with each other that so much comedy and fun comes from those limitations. And so yeah, it was really important to make it true to LEGO.

DAN HERNANDEZ: I mean, I can speak from my own experience, which is I am not a LEGO expert to the same extent that Benji ism not even close. So there were a lot of times where he would be having a very serious discussion about legal builds or the stud count. And I’m going, “Hmm. Yes, of course. Of course.” But I will say this because of Benji and Chris Buckley that are brilliant, director and LEGO Group and Atomic Cartoons, absolute dedication to getting it right, we’re actually seeing things at LEGO that we’ve never seen before. One of my favorite shots in the entire series is we did a brick built hyperspace effect. To me, it’s just so cool. Every time I see it, I’m like-

SAMIT: There were definitely some questions about that early on where it’s just like, I don’t know, Star Wars has always had this one special effect that we do for hyperspace and maybe we don’t mess that up. And we were like, well, let’s just try. Let’s try. Let’s see what it would look like with LEGO pieces in there. And then when we all saw it, we were like, yes, this is the thing. Or even since 1977, Star Wars has always had the same star field. The star field has always looked the same, but if you look closely, the star field is little LEGO studs. And we just felt that it was truer to what we were trying to do here. It’s still true to the spirit of the original star field, but with that little LEGO twist.

HERNANDEZ: There was a true attention to detail, I think, with everything having to do with LEGO and everything having to do with Star Wars, that I think comes from our own sort of innate nerdiness and obsessiveness. So I hope that that comes through.

Why Did Jedi Bob’s Flashback Look Like That?
Image via Disney+

It does. Oh, it does. And that actually leads me to my next question, which is when Jedi Bob is thinking back to the destruction of his galaxy, there’s a slight shift in the style of the animation. And I was curious, with that, what was the rationale for that? Was it just to set it apart as a different part of the LEGO universe?

SAMIT: So Jedi Bob is a character essentially from an old LEGO set from the early 2000s back when all the LEGO Star Wars sets had those classic yellow minifigs, which they’ve since shifted from. And so if we were going to have this character from the yellow LEGO Star Wars galaxy, we wanted his galaxy to look and feel like what those sets felt like back in that era of LEGO. So you see the Jedi temple he’s in and this and that. It’s all a sort of more old-school LEGO build design language, simpler, there’s fewer pieces to work with, fewer colors of bricks. And we gave ourselves the limitations of what those old LEGO sets look like, but also those old LEGO fan films looked like.

HERNANDEZ: And not to get highfalutin about it metatextually but we felt it was important to draw in the legacy not only of every era of Star Wars, but every era of LEGO. So this partnership, which is this is the 25th anniversary of the partnership between LEGO and Star Wars, and so we said we should honor those initial sets that have now become so sophisticated, but they started somewhere. And we felt like how cool would it be to actually go back to the beginning for Jedi Bob? And we weren’t sure we were going to be allowed to do it and able to do it. And to everyone’s credit, LEGO, Lucasfilm, everyone, they said, “Yes, go for it.” And to me, it’s one of the more surprising moments in the entire special because I don’t think you fully see it coming.

Did Lucasfilm or Disney Say “No” to Anything They Pitched?

And that also brings me to what I think is going to be my last question with both of you, which is the thing that I love the most about the LEGO universe and specifically the LEGO Star Wars universe, is how it doesn’t take itself super seriously, and it’s free to make jokes about aspects of Star Wars that maybe other shows don’t have the ability to. So were there ever any jokes where Lucasfilm and Disney were like, “Oh, let’s reel it back.”? Or did you just have full freedom to poke at things and play on things that most of us are thinking anyways?

SAMIT: Yeah, we never had any limitations on what we wanted to do. I think we didn’t want to write anything that went too far. There is that balance. I mean, we love Star Wars. We love elements of every Star Wars that has ever been done. And we’re coming at this as fans that, yeah, in LEGO you poke playful fun, but it’s all coming from a place of love. And that’s how we approached it here, and I think everyone at Lucasfilm saw that.

HERNANDEZ: I think that part of being a fan is over time, accepting the totality of what is in the fandom that you’re working in. And it felt to me like if we can’t have fun with some of these moments that are either famous or infamous for whatever reason or memeable moments or lines that at the time didn’t seem iconic but have subsequently become iconic over the course of years as new fans are coming into it, it felt like we were ignoring an important part of what it means to be in the LEGO and Star Wars worlds. And so as much as possible, we said, let’s go for it. And if we ever go too far, someone will hopefully tell us. And that just didn’t really ever happen. And we were really fortunate.

SAMIT: I think it’s also because we tried not to ever just do silly jokes and references just for the sake of it, like tossed aside little gags and stuff. Almost everything is really connected to the story. And the story was first for us for everything. It was always like, well, what serves the story? Does this little gag actually serve the characters or are we just trying to squeeze in a gag. If it felt like we were just trying to squeeze it in, we cut it. Yeah.

HERNANDEZ: So there was a lot of stuff that didn’t make it to the end that was really funny. But ultimately, we kind of whittled it down to the essentials that we’re serving the story that we wanted to tell.

LEGO Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy is streaming now on Disney+.

Stream on Disney+