The Freemakers Return for a Curtain Call in Lego Star Wars: All-Stars




Last year, I had the pleasure of discovering Lego Star Wars: The Freemaker Adventures, an animated escapade through a Lego version of the Star Wars universe that featured a great voice cast, witty scripts, and enough Easter Eggs to keep Star Wars fans rewinding and pausing their video playback machines for hours on end. The series ran for a total of 26 episodes across two seasons, and not much was said about the future of the Freemaker family after that … until the arrival of Lego Star Wars: All-Stars, which debuted last October on various Disney media channels (e.g., Disney XD and DisneyNOW).

Even though All-Stars has been touted as a series of eight shorts and four episodes that span the entire Star Wars saga, it really is the third season of Freemaker Adventures. It uses Lego-themed parodies of Solo: A Star Wars Story to provide an origin story for the Freemaker family, and then it fast-forwards to the sequel trilogy era (The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi) to explore what happened to the Freemakers after the fall of Palpatine’s Empire. All-Stars has the same development and production team that created Freemaker Adventures (namely, Bill Motz, Bob Roth, Jill Wilfert and Erik Wilstrup), so I’m guessing that Disney and Lucasfilm allowed them to use All-Stars as a sendoff for the Freemaker characters as long as they used the most recent Star Wars movies as part of the story.


All in the (space) family: the Freemaker family and their droid Roger.


Unfortunately, such a disjointed arrangement of shorts, episodes and narrative settings results in a few problems. All-Stars is largely divided between two specific parts of the saga—the Solo time frame and the first two movies of the sequel trilogy—so it isn’t able to build a strong central narrative to move the series forward. Furthermore, we don’t see much of the Zander, Kordi and Rowan Freemaker. Their ever-loyal droid Roger gets the most screen time and he’s the character that ties everything together in All-Stars, but the original Freemaker sibling trio is sorely missed.

Shortcomings aside, I’ve watched all of the All-Stars episodes so far and I think that it mostly lives up to standard of quality set by the original Freemaker series. Freemaker fans will want to see the All-Stars episodes to learn more about their favorite Lego characters, and general Star Wars fans will be entertained by the series’ attention to detail and numerous references to all kinds of Star Wars lore. (For example, the short that takes place during the Battle of Jakku features a Sandspeeder, one of the vehicles that Kenner planned to release as part of its extended Star Wars toy line in 1986.) Tune in to the final episode this Saturday, December 8th, and you can catch up on all of the previous shorts and episodes at DisneyNOW.



Related Products:

LEGO Star Wars 75185 Tracker I LEGO Star Wars 75209 Han Solo's Landspeeder LEGO Star Wars 75202 Defense of Crait

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