Way back in 2005, long before Jon Favreau’s The Mandalorian became the first-ever live-action Star Wars television show, and many years before Disney acquired Lucasfilm, Star Wars creator George Lucas had an idea for a scripted live-action TV show called Star Wars: Underworld.
Had it been made, the series would take place almost entirely on Coruscant, a city-covered planet and the capital of the galaxy. Specifically, it would have explored the planet’s underworld, seen in Star Wars: Attack of the Clones and in the animated series The Clones Wars, a place brimming with bounty hunters, spies for the Empire and Rebellion alike, and criminal gangs.
Obviously, this show never got made, but just the other day, test footage from an episode cropped up on YouTube, together with a behind-the-scenes look at how it came together, with Lucas himself behind the camera. Check it out:
Okay, let’s break this down a bit: A prequels-era vehicle lands in a Coruscant back alley. Stormtroopers — not clone troopers — are walking around on high alert, looking for dissidents and Rebel spies. A woman wearing a hooded cloak emerges from the vehicle, surreptitiously collects plans for a Star Destroyer from someone, loads them into a street-level computer terminal, and ducks into a weapons shop where she’s followed by Stormtroopers.
Then we get the worst blaster fight in the history of Star Wars. I mean, really…none of these people can hit the broad side of a barn, and they’re literally a few feet from each other.
It all ends when the guy behind the counter arms a detonator and blows up the shop, presumably killing everyone inside. We rarely saw that kind of violence in Lucas’ Star Wars movies; this looks more like something out of 2016’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, which featured morally ambiguous heroes and a terrorist cell whose methods were denounced by everyone, including the Rebellion.
As big a Star Wars fan as I am, I must admit that I’ve never seen this footage before, although according to Polygon it’s been on the Vimeo page for VFX studio Stargate Studios for about nine years, right under our noses.
Anyway, Lucas was all in on Star Wars: Underworld, putting together a writing team and even completing a whopping 50 scripts. Unfortunately, the show was just too expensive for him to make at the time. Too bad he didn’t have some of that Disney money way back in 2005.
The production values do look pretty impressive, especially considering how there was little else like this back then. Now, in a post-Game of Thrones world, a show that looks like this seems way more doable, although even compared to something like The Mandalorian, this looks elaborate. I guess this just wasn’t the show’s time, although it’s interesting that Lucas was envisioning a Star Wars TV show over a decade before we actually got one.
What do you think? Did we miss out on this show, or was it all for the best? Disney is running into some problems making its Obi-Wan Kenobi show. If that doesn’t pan out, maybe Star Wars: Underworld could make a good replacement?
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