Former Lucasfilm Animation Employee Says He's Embarrassed And Ashamed To Have Worked At Lucasfim And On Star Wars After 'The Acolyte'
John F. Trent
A former Lucasfilm employee recently shared that he’s embarrassed to have worked on Star Wars in the wake of The Acolyte releasing to Disney+.
The employee who runs a channel called Knee Payne detailed he was at Lucasfilm when the company was sold by George Lucas to The Walt Disney Company.
He detailed, “I was there when that happened and watched 90% of my co-workers get laid off. I [was] the lucky enough to survive that layoff. I use the word ‘lucky’ loosely. But I was there during the transition. I’ll admit early on there was some hope. There was hope because they sat down, you know, [Kathleen Kennedy] in a presentation of the company and they showed us something we had never seen before under George and that was a 10-year plan. … I actually felt really good about that. They said, ‘They’re going to be three more movies.’ You know, we’re all really excited.”
He then shared, “I left some years after that. I’ve been gone for about seven years now. And, I talked about this in another video, when the third set of trilogies came out: The Force Awakens and the whole thing with Rey. I try to block a lot of it out. Actually, I don’t remember the names of all those episodes that came out under [Kathleen Kennedy]. But I remember going to the crew screenings and coming out not really feeling it, right?
“And then having the audacity and the nerve at work to say, ‘Yeah, I didn’t really like it.’ And then starting to find out who the real fanboys are. And I’ll tell you what, some of the biggest fanboys you’ll find, and the most toxic, work there. ‘Cause you weren’t allowed to not like it. If you had an opinion, best to keep it to yourself. People would make you very, very uncomfortable,” he asserted.
“I really was not happy with the culture, the life there. It had changed a lot.,” he went on to state.
Later in the video, he detailed how co-workers at Lucasfilm lost their minds at him because he noted he did not like the character of Rey.
He said, “I remember a personal experience being in the studio and being like, ‘I don’t know if I really like the character Rey.’ And just like my co-workers just losing their ever living s**t at me. Really getting pissed off at me because I didn’t like it.”
Furthermore, he relayed that you could not express negative opinions regarding Disney’s Star Wars claiming it was “taboo.”
Interestingly, he went on to reveal that Dave Filoni has been driving significant creative choices going as far back as to The Clone Wars.
He explained, “[Dave Filoni] has had power for a long time. He’s even had power back to The Clone Wars days to carefully pushback on certain decisions. When it came to Clone Wars because definitely early on George drove it all, but there was definitely a point — I can’t really tell you what season it was — where Filoni and rightfully so — if you’re the Supervising Director, you need to stand up for the project at some point — he did the right thing in standing up to George.”
Still later in the video, he reacted to The Acolyte and the show’s third episode. The episode depicts Mae lighting a candle, throwing it at the room she locked her sister into, and attempting to burn her sister alive. It also shows this fire apparently spreading throughout an entire fortress. Eventually a scene shows the coven of lesbian witches laying on the ground dead as one of the Jedi escorts Osha out of the fortress. Her sister Mae fell down a shaft and was believed to be dead.
He said, “You see little tidbits like this. I don’t need to see the whole thing, honestly, to know that there’s really bad writing involved. This is just so cringy, outside the blasted song. That was awful.”
Then after watching a clip of Koril tell Mother Aniseya that she carried the twins and Mother Aniseya informing her that she created them, he said, “Honestly, between clips like that and this overwhelmingly negative responses by the fans, why on earth would I want to subscribe to Disney+ to actually watch this so I could have an informed opinion? My opinion’s informed enough.”
Next, he declared. “It used to be kind of nice to have that part of life on the résumé. It made for a good icebreaker especially when I got out of the industry. … Now, it’s kind of embarrassing actually. It really actually kind of is embarrassing.”
He later added, “I can’t believe I’m actually kind of ashamed a little bit. Now, with that said I think I’d be more ashamed if I’d worked at Lucasfilm over the past 6 to 8 years. That’s definitely worth being ashamed of. I left before things got really bad, but I’m still kind of ashamed. Still kind of ashamed. And I do feel bad for the fans.”
Finally, he concluded his video informing viewers that Star Wars is not going to get any better, “I’ve known for a long time it’s not going to get better. … I could have told a lot of you this from my personal experience and what I’ve seen, what I know. It was never going to get better. I knew they were going to double down, quadruple down on their position and just keep going in that direction. And here it is.”
“A lot of people are saying, ‘Okay, that’s it. This episode three of Acolyte has killed Star Wars.’ I disagree with that one. I think we have yet to see Star Wars truly die,” he said. “They’re going to take it one step further just you wait and see. We have yet to see their final form. This is not the end boss. We have yet to actually see the end boss, the true bottom of the barrel of the abysmal thing they call creativity at that company. We have yet to see its final form. These are mini bosses. Leslye Headland, she’s a mini boss. I think [Kathleen Kennedy’s] a mini boss, honestly.”
“Is Filoni the final end boss? Who knows? Who knows? But it is going to get worse. Just you wait. It is going to get worse. I guarantee it,” he concluded.
