How Gaming Helped Shape the LEGO Star Wars Holiday Special

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The LEGO® Star Wars™ Holiday Special was — in some ways — shaped by the upcoming game LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga and other LEGO video game elements, the movie’s director said in a recent episode of podcast Bits N’ Bricks. 

Director Ken Cunningham mentioned the upcoming game while discussing how the movie, which hit Disney+ in November, came about. 

“I was working on the Jurassic series at the time and had a meeting actually with my head of production, and he said that we were being looked at to do some Star Wars content,” he said. “They wanted to really see if we could hit that sort of cinematic Star Wars look. And so, we dug in on that. I looked really strongly at the films and actually, at the time, the trailer for the new game that’s coming out in the new year. 

“We looked at the quality of that, which was really awesome. And we just sort of pushed as hard as we could, delivered a look I was pretty satisfied with, and apparently, so was Lucasfilm because we got the gig.” 

A team of more than 100 at Atomic Cartoons worked on the film, which Cunningham described as a “rip-roaring time romp through all the Star Wars fan-favorite moments.” 

Cunningham also noted that while the now infamous 1978 Star Wars holiday special was a “touchstone” for this film, it wasn’t meant to be a starting point. What that means is that while you’ll find plenty of references — like Life Day and Chewbacca dad Itchy — you won’t find any of the sometimes-artless musical numbers. Instead, the film tells a wholly original tale peopled by the iconic figures of both the original and more modern films. 

“We’ve got the Wookiees, we’ve got Itchy, but there’s not a ton in there that we really picked up on,” he said. “And that was by choice. It’s really more modern, centered around Rey and Finn.” 

Cunningham also noted how the group at Atomic used LEGO Digital Designer — a program that initially was born of a video game — to create models using digital LEGO bricks, which are then brought into the studio’s software system and used to help make the actual animation. 

“They’re basically taking virtual digitized LEGO bricks and clicking them together and putting the pieces together to make something,” he said. “I mean, frequently they’ll be working off an image from our design team, but the design team too will be doing the same thing. So as they’re kind of roughing together concepts for the art director and I to look at, they’ll also be working in Digital Designer and building these quick little things and then maybe pull them into Photoshop and do a quick paint-over on them to flesh the idea out.” 

While the LEGO Star Wars Holiday Special was born of the hard work and creativity of Cunningham and the rest of the team at Atomic Cartoons, the history of LEGO video games and the rules they established and evolved for the look, motion, and tone of minifigures clearly had an impact as well. 

This article originally ran on LEGO.com as a summary of episode one of the weekly Bits N’ Bricks podcast, which you can listen to here.

Explore more 

In order of appearance 

The LEGO Wars Holiday Special (2020) Official page 

LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga (2020) Official page 

The Star Wars Holiday Special (1978) Wikipedia entry 

LEGO Digital Designer (2019) Wikipedia entry 

Star Wars’ infamous Holiday Special, explained (2017) YouTube video