“Star Wars: Skeleton Crew,” courtesy Disney.

Excitement, eagerness and a little bit of fear; this is what the kids in “Star Wars: Skeleton Crew” feel when they accidentally blast off their planet on an old pirate starship. But this is also how composer Mick Giacchino felt when he was offered the chance to score a “Star Wars” show.

The eight-episode show is about four children on a suburban-looking planet who get lost in the “Star Wars” galaxy and need to find their way back home. Giacchino says that the desire to go off and have an adventure is relatable for any “Star Wars” fan.

“For me, it was a dream project, because I get to put those feelings that I had as a kid, watching [“Star Wars”], into the music,” he says. “It was a real pinch-me moment.”

Giacchino has scored other TV shows, including Max’s “The Penguin” and Disney+’s “The Muppets Mayhem,” but the chance to write music for a show in the same universe as Luke Skywalker was special, he says.

“Star Wars has been such a big part of my life, and the music from that is so ingrained in my mind that it’s always an influence,” he says.

John Williams, the composer of the original movies, is a titan and someone to whom Giacchino has always looked for inspiration. To get past any trepidation about filling such big shoes, GiaccHino told himself not to think of the project as “Star Wars.” The story centers on kids longing for adventure, so Giacchino focused more on the story itself than the galaxy far, far away. The notes he received referred to “Skeleton Crew” as an action adventure show that would invoke the fun of ’80s Amblin films like “The Goonies.” That helped lessen the pressure. Pirates were also part of the prompt from the showrunners, and Giacchino ran with that.

L-R: John Knoll, Matthew Wood and Mick Giacchino attend the “Star Wars: Skeleton Crew” launch at Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif. on Dec. 2, 2024. Photo by Leon Bennett/Disney.

“In one cue, I put harpsichord in to give it a little bit more of that pirate flair,” he says. “I chose to focus a lot of their themes and quieter moments on bass flute and alto flute to give it a little bit of that Disneyland ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ vibe, going through the caverns.”

Everything came full circle at the “Skeleton Crew” premiere at Disneyland. After the showing, Giacchino and others who worked on the show rode the Pirates of the Carribbean ride together.

He had a bit longer than he normally would to compose for the show because of the writers’ and actors’ strikes. While he acknowledges such circumstances were not ideal, it ended up being a luxurious amount of time for him to write; about eight months in all. After viewing the rough cuts, Giacchino says he sat at the piano and “noodled around” before he found a chord sequence that fit; it felt whimsical and optimistic, like it was looking toward adventure.

“The very first thing I wrote for it was a suite,” he says. “I was listening to ‘The Goonies’ and ‘Back to the Future,’ and how those incorporated strings and the orchestra.”

He got creative with the instruments he used for the show’s music, including theremin, a Turkish lute called a yaylı tambur and dulcimer. He raves about working with multi-instrumentalist George Doering, who’s worked on more than 800 film scores, to create the soundscape he wanted.

“He’s a genius, he can essentially play any stringed instrument you throw at him,” Giacchino says of Doering. “He’s really good at adding tension and also just embellishing little details.”

“Skeleton Crew” was filmed almost two years ago, but due to the strikes and other scheduling issues, its release was delayed. Giacchino says the show is unique in that it is self-contained, and doesn’t necessarily cross over with other “Star Wars” story lines, so he wasn’t hindered by characters with “strong musical identities” showing up. There are however, two moments that incorporated preexisting music. One was the force theme that plays briefly in the second episode, used subtly, with cello.

“We want to have it feel like John Williams is peeking his head in the door but not walking through it,” he says the directors said.

The other moment was a glimpse of the dancers from the “Star Wars Holiday Special,” which was a fun Easter egg moment for fans (including Giacchino).

“I especially love that they recreated all the costumes, and they had to film all of that again,” he says. “It was fun for us on the stage, because it was so different from everything else we were recording; it’s like circus music.”

Giacchino always wanted to make films, but it wasn’t a given that he’d be a composer. From a young age, he and his cousins made stop-motion animation movies with Legos, which later progressed into live action movies about mutants with superpowers. But he also loved playing music.

“In early high school, I started playing in rock bands with friends, and writing songs,” he says. “Slowly, I started getting more into orchestral writing and film scores. Around the summer in high school is when I realized, ‘Oh, I can actually, I can see myself pursuing this and going to school for this.’”

He also credits his father, composer Michael Giacchino, with bringing him to orchestra sessions as a kid, and letting him hang out and absorb everything.

“I would go around to the different sections and I would just sit in the back and listen to the trombones or to the trumpets, to the woodwinds, to the French horns and the percussion section,” he says. “The percussion section was usually my favorite because they always had these random instruments that they would make from trash or junk. … They would find whatever they could could hit and be like, ‘Oh, this makes a cool sound.’”

Follow Rachel Alm on Instagram at @thousandfold, and on Bluesky at @thousandfold.bsky.social.