January 26th, 2025 
W.R. Miller 
Two brothers. One seeks adventure, the other prefers the quiet life. Both are nerf-herders in a galaxy far, far away. And one manages to turn the galaxy upside down.
Meet Sig Greebling. He likes to stay a farmer, regaling the neighborhood kids with the Skywalker saga, while his older brother Dev wants to create his own adventures, traveling the stars with his friend, Yesi Scala. Then Sig and Dev discover a Jedi temple containing a cornerstone which, when removed, changes reality. And so it does. Sig finds himself in a universe where the Good Guys and Bad Guys have switched roles, mashed together from the Trade Federation War to the fight against the First Order. Ewoks are spaceship-flying bounty hunters. Vader, Maul and Palpatine are on the side of the rebels, while Dev has become a Sith Lord, Darth Devastator.
This is the story of LEGO Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy, a four-part miniseries created, written and executive-produced by Dan Hernandez and Benji Samit, and directed by Chris Buckley. These gentlemen share what it was like to merge the LEGO and Star Wars franchises into a world of adventure, imagination, and fun.
“They just celebrated the 25th anniversary of the LEGO-Star Wars partnership,” Benji Samit begins. “Some of the first licensed LEGO sets ever were Star Wars LEGO sets. For the first several decades of LEGO and the plastic building system, it was always just LEGO themes. There was LEGO space, LEGO pirates, LEGO castle and LEGO City and all the normal LEGO themes that we’re used to.
“In the ‘90s LEGO as a company was struggling financially. Then they made this deal with George Lucas when Phantom Menace was coming out to start making LEGO Star Wars sets. They just took off immediately. Like, people who love LEGO and people who love Star Wars, the Venn diagram is almost a complete circle.
“They started making video games and short films and there’ve been lots of fan films. A LEGO Star Wars tone which slowly developed over the years, where it doesn’t take itself as seriously and it’s more playful. It’s become its own little subsection of fandom in the specific LEGO Star Wars area. Star Wars is 25-30% of all LEGO sales and it’s just this perfect partnership,” Samit says.
Previously, the writing team of Hernandez and Samit tallied TV credits on 1600 Penn (2012), Super Fun Night (2014), The Tick (live-action, 2016), and One Day at a Time (2017). Their feature credits include Pokémon Detective Pikachu (2019), The Addams Family 2 (2021), and Teenage Mutant Nina Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023). Paste magazine listed them as one of the top 28 comedy writers of 2018. And Lucasfilm took notice.
Says Samit, “When they were working on the LEGO Star Wars Holiday Special—which we didn’t write—Dan and I came in just like a one-day comedy punch-up for that one.
“They saw what massive LEGO Star Wars fans we are. I’ve been a huge LEGO person for years and years. I have a massive LEGO collection and I’m a LEGO die hard. Then they wanted to do something bigger for the 25th anniversary of the partnership. And so, they decided to call the biggest LEGO Star Wars fans they knew, which was us, and said, ‘How can we go big for the 25th anniversary?’ That’s where Rebuild the Galaxy came from.”
LEGO typically satirizes the brands it partners with, just as Star Trek Prodigy and Star Trek Lower Decks satirizes the tropes of their franchise. Does this genre of comedy-adventure have a name?
“It’s a great question,” Dan Hernandez says. “The scope of Star Wars and Star Trek is large enough to encompass all different explorations of the various galaxies. We’re really great friends with Mike McMahon who did Lower Decks. He’s as big a Star Trek fan as anyone I’ve ever met. And I think that that genuine affection also enables him to find the things that are kind of silly and kind of funny about Star Trek and that we love.
“It was a similar sort of approach for us on Rebuild the Galaxy. I’m 41 and I’ve been making jokes about them since I was four. I remember Star Wars being a part of my consciousness from a very, very young age because my brother is 12 years older, so I inherited all his Star Wars stuff. I think it was the same with Chris [Buckley, the director], and certainly for Benji. We were living and breathing this stuff. We were finding weird line readings that we thought were funny and repeating them and inside jokes with our friends. And I know that Chris ran a longstanding Star Wars roleplaying game adventure and his character Easter egg actually found his way into Rebuild the Galaxy, Jim the Dark Jawa.
“All of these things are a real part of everything that we have been kind of just like living with. It sounds like that’s a burden but it’s not. We were able to focus it into, ‘Okay, we want to do something a little off-kilter in keeping with the LEGO comedic sensibility. Let’s do a straight Star Wars adventure but with room to make fun of ourselves. Because if you can’t make fun of yourself then it becomes ponderous.”
“We’re making fun of Star Wars,” Samit says, “but in a very loving way that’s not cynical.”
“You’re making fun with Star Wars, not of Star Wars,” Buckley inserts.
“Yeah, it’s like the way you tease a family member who you love more than anything,” Samit says.
“Except they might have a lightsaber or blaster,” Hernandez quips.
The project was greenlit in 2022, and the production studio chosen was Atomic Cartoons of Vancouver, Canada, who had had experience with previous LEGO Star Wars-themed projects like the aforementioned LEGO Star Wars Holiday Special (2020), LEGO Star Wars: Terrifying Tales (2021), and LEGO Star Wars: Summer Vacation (2022).
“We knew we were doing it with Atomic because they’ve done a bunch of LEGO content,” Samit confirms. “Within Atomic we met with some of the directors. We immediately fell in love with Chris—and it’s hard to even remember back to that first meeting.”
Hernandez says, “Benji’s speaking to is a sympatico of spirit that was apparent from the first meeting.”
“Chris’ excitement level for it, what he wanted to do was completely in line with how we were seeing it, if we can do something bigger and better and more cinematic than any LEGO TV content that’s come before,” Samit says.
“I would add to that, I’m not an artist,” Hernandez says. “My mom is a professor of visual arts actually but for whatever reason I did not inherit those skills into my hands. So I’m a writer who’s very interested in animation and who has a lot of ideas but can’t actually physically articulate it. I’m really dependent on people who can, and who can take the ideas that we have and say, ‘Okay I see what you’re doing and here’s 10 ways that I’ve made it even more dynamic.’ Chris, I have to say, his superpower is the staging of the action. It’s just unbelievable that this is his first outing as a director.
“A cut will come in and there’ll still be some refinements to be made. Between Part One and Part Two a lot of the time there will be new bits that I fully didn’t expect and I’ll be like, ‘Where did this come from?’ And Chris would say, ‘I just thought it could be even better.’
In other words, unlike some writer-driven shows, Hernandez and Samit allowed the director to have creative leeway on the project.
“100%,” Hernandez says.
Samit recalls, “It got to the point where, as we went further for writing the later episodes, we would sometimes write into the script like, ‘Chris does cool stuff here.’ Bingo. Because that’s his superpower. We can write great scenes, but when it comes to a giant space battle where everyone’s flying around and it’s as big and insane as possible, we’re just like, ‘Let Chris do his thing.’ We like to collaborate like that.
Says Hernandez, “It speaks to a larger philosophical point of view that Benji and I have that we try to engender into everyone. It sounds like a joke the first time I say it—but I often will say ‘Follow your heart.’ And it sounds like me punting to not make a decision sometimes, but really what I’m saying is, ‘Chris, you’re one of the best directors in the world. Michael [Kramer], you’re one of the best composers in the world. Jeff [King], you’re one of the best sound engineers in the world. I am not the person to tell you what you think needs to be. I’m not going to be prescriptive about what I think.’
“I have opinions and sometimes if I feel like something is not right, of course I’ll weigh in. But 99% of the time, if you tell a brilliant artist, ‘Follow your heart, do what excites you,’ the things that they’re going to present back to you is so much better than anything that you could have prescribed. Obviously there’s guidelines and things that you can and can’t do, or realities of we can’t afford to do this, or the time frame is too great. But in general, if you really empower people to follow their art and rely on the expertise they’ve honed over many years, you are rarely disappointed in the results.
“Dan and Benji sort of saying ‘Come to us with your best ideas’ trickles down,” Buckley says. “I made sure the crew felt that as well. I’d always say ‘Do this but if you have a better idea, bring to the table.’ Then we’ll mold it before we present it and here’s what we’re thinking.
“That really excites artists because all of a sudden they have a say in what’s going to be on the screen. It’s not paint by numbers. I can’t count how many artists have told me on this project that this was the best project they’ve ever worked on. And that’s new people. That’s people have been in the industry for five years. That’s people that have been in the industry for 20 years. Them having not the freedom but the ability to explore and to have a conversation about, ‘Yes, what we’ve done here is good but how can we make it better?’ That’s quite rare. We were able to have that and we made a really fantastic product because of it.”
(L-R) Dan Hernandez, Chris Buckley and Benji Samit attend the special screening of LEGO® STAR WARS: REBUILD THE GALAXY at El Capitan Theatre on September 12, 2024 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images for Disney)
Chris Buckley’s experience has been primarily CG, serving as animator in many projects including Reboot (1997), Escape from Planet Earth (2012), The Smurfs 2 (2013), progressing to senior animator on Star Wars: Episode VIII—The Last Jedi, followed by animating a slew of LEGO movies. But the LEGO style of animation is different from standard CG, combining action with a frame rate “on ones” and “on fours” for staccato movement. How did Buckley adjust?
“Before I got into CG I was going to go into stop motion,” he says. “I went down the rabbit hole and looked at schooling for that. It’s quite difficult in a very niche market to get into. So I went into the CG realm. I’ve been doing this since 1997 where I worked on a show called Reboot. I worked at Animal Logic on the LEGO Movie sequel (2019). Seeing that style of animation—which is a bit different from what we do—but how they did it and us bringing it to the LEGO sort of like higher fidelity visual effects-looking show has a lot of appeal. We’re able to really play with the toyetic nature of LEGO in addition to the conceit of it being inside of a kid’s imagination. That’s how we’re able to mash up Luke and Leia and whoever from different eras quite successfully.”
But is the animation done “on ones” and then the frame rate is reduced to achieve the style?
“No,” he says. “And that’s a really good question. New animators, or animators who’ve been doing this for quite a while, do that and you can see it from a mile away because it doesn’t look authentic. It doesn’t look what I call ‘janky.’ Because I want to see those imperfections within the animation. I don’t want you taking stuff away, because with CG animation you set a key frame here and set a key frame there and the computer interpolates the rest. So what we really tried to do is make sure your blocking pass was as rough as possible and at that point we would add key frames in. We wouldn’t take them away because I don’t want too much information.
“I want that emotion and action as clear as possible with the least amount of movement in there because that feels like an authentic 1999 YouTube video of some kid doing stop motion, not the high fidelity of it,” Buckley says.
One of the charms of Rebuild the Galaxy is that characters, employing the Force, can kinetically reassemble a shattered spacecraft into a completely new vehicle—thereby displaying the versatility of what can be done with LEGO building blocks in a Star Wars setting. A similar scene occurred in Disney’s Tron (1982), in which the hero Flynn (Jeff Bridges) employs telekinesis to reassemble a shattered Recognizer flyer in midair. Was this inspiration for the Rebuild the Galaxy team?
“I’m a big fan of Tron,” Buckley says. “I completely forgot that scene, and I’m going to be watching it afterwards for sort of a reference pull.”
“Maybe subconsciously,” Samit says.
“Now that you mention it, I do remember that scene,” Hernandez says. “Maybe it was operating under the surface of our brains or something.”
Buckley says, “Any of the transformations going from one object to another is leaning on the Force, making sure it felt authentic to Rey in The Last Jedi, the rocks floating like the mysticism of that feeling. as well as sort of the awe-inspiring beauty of changing from one thing to another with LEGO. That’s part of the fun. We really tried to make sure those exploding ships turning into something else was a bit of spectacle.”
“We’re taking the vocabulary of two different universes,” Hernandez points out. “We wanted to make it feel organic to Star Wars itself and to the Force and to the LEGO Star Wars. It’s simply another expression of the Star Wars galaxy that we’ve all grown up with. A lot of the thematic language, even the plot movements about the cornerstone of the galaxy, was very intentionally designed to meld these two universes into a singular thing that felt not forced in any way. This is just a corner of Star Wars and LEGO that has always existed and perpetuates itself. It has its own rules and its own language and its own idiosyncratic behaviors and its own ships and its own everything. The nature of the show to begin with was deconstruction. We also had to deconstruct the way that we wrote about Star Wars, the way that the language was utilized in Star Wars.
“That was a wonderful challenge. These sophisticated ideas had to be distilled so that kids could also understand it,” Hernandez says. “I know plenty of adults enjoyed the show as well but at the same time we want kids to watch the show and understand it and not be confused or find it kind of wishy-washy. So they had to have a precision of language in the melding of these two things. The visuals reflect the thematics in that way. And I’m really proud of it.”
To be continued.
Other executive producers listed for LEGO Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy: Jason Cosler, Jacqui Lopez, Keith Malone, Josh Rimes, James Waugh and Jill Wilfert. Daniel Cavey was senior producer for Lucasfilm Ltd., Steven L. Grover was supervising producer for Atomic Cartoons, and Jason D. Stein was co-producer.
LEGO Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy was released September 13, 2024 on Disney+, and December 5, 2024 on the Star Wars Kids YouTube Channel, just in time for the Christmas season.
ASIFA-Hollywood has nominated LEGO Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy for the 2025 Annie Awards, as Best Limited Series Animated Television/Media Production, for Part Three.
The Motion Picture Sound Editors, USA has nominated Jeff King (supervising sound editor), Frank Rinella (supervising foley editor), Shaun Farley (foley editor) and Margie O’Malley for the 2025 Golden Reel Awards for Outstanding Achievement in Sound Editing—Broadcast Animation for Part Two.
Special thanks to Lillian Noble, Lucasfilm Publicity.
Interview conducted January 22, 2025.
He has just completed Batman: The Animated Interviews, a five-volume work featuring the executives, producers, directors, writers, actors, designers, storyboard artists and composers involved with the making of Batman: The Animated Series and its spinoffs. BearManor Media is the publisher.
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