Outlander producer remembers the moody Star Wars show that never happened

Star Wars is the gift that keeps on giving, even when it’s not. In a recent interview with Collider, Ronald D. Moore, the executive producer of Outlander, revealed something quite interesting about a particular Star Wars show that never came to be.

It comes as no surprise that Moore was one of the chosen few to join this long-lost Star Wars project given his expertise in the sci-fi/fantasy world; before Outlander he had a long resume that included shows like Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine? That got him an invite to become a writer on a George Lucas-led Star Wars show known as Star Wars: Underworld.

According to Moore, Lucas wanted all the scripts for the show written before a single frame was shot, which is fairly common today with premium drama like Game of Thrones having made it standard for a lot of cable networks, but back in 2004, it was an oddity. George Lucas has always wanted to shake things up.

“I was one of several, there was a bunch of international writers they assembled,” Moore remembered. “We would gather up at Skywalker Ranch once every six to eight weeks, something like that. And we would break stories together, and right after we’d go off and write some drafts and bring ‘em back, and George and we would sit down and critique them, and then do another draft and break more stories.”

Unfortunately, despite all that work and time, the project didn’t come to fruition, and now dozens of unproduced scripts are just sitting in a safe on Skywalker Ranch or something:

"[…] It was great! It was a ball, it was a lot of fun. It didn’t happen ultimately, we wrote I’d say somewhere in the 40-something, 48 scripts, something like that… the theory was George wanted to write all the scripts and get ‘em all done and then he was gonna go off and figure out how to produce them, because he wanted to do a lot of cutting edge technological stuff with CG and virtual sets and so on. And so he had a whole new thing he wanted to accomplish. And what happened was, you know, we wrote the scripts and then George said ‘OK, this is enough for now, and then I’ll get back to you. I want to look into all the production things.’ And then time went by and like a year or something after that is when he sold Lucasfilm to Disney."

So, Disney, we know you’re over-saturating the world with Star Wars right now, but is there any chance we’ll ever see this live-action series?

If it helps, it seems like some of what Lucas wanted to do with Underworld has been realized by The Mandalorian. If you’ve been watching Disney Gallery: Star Wars: The Mandalorian Disney+, then you know that they have a ridiculously amazing stage they’ve built with cutting edge technology. Referred to as “The Volume,” it allows the filmmakers to simulate outdoor locations with such accuracy that viewers at home can’t tell the difference, or at least, we couldn’t most of the time. The set can literally change in a blink of an eye, eliminating the need to travel to exotic locations.

Plus, Star Wars: Underworld would have focused on…well, the Star Wars underworld, less about Jedis in their towers and more about the grunts just trying to make a living by any means necessary in that galaxy far, far away. Likewise, The Mandalorian follows a grizzled bounty hunter as he treks across the universe, meeting all kinds of unsavory characters along the way.

“It was an extraordinary undertaking for someone to do,” Moore remembered. “I don’t know anyone else that would really take that on… At the time, George just said ‘write them as big as you want, and we’ll figure it out later.’ So we really had no [budget] constraints. We were all experienced television and feature writers, so we all kind of knew what was theoretically possible on a production budget. But we just went, ‘For this pass, OK let’s just take him at his word just to make it crazy and big’ and there was lots of action, lots of sets, and huge set pieces. Just much bigger than what you would normally do in a television show.”

We don’t exactly know major details about Underworld, but some things have slipped out over the years, including Lucas’ idea to incorporate film noir elements. It allegedly was meant to take place between Revenge of the Sith (Episode 3) and A New Hope (Episode 4), the same time period as Rogue One?

"Yeah, I think it was pretty much one big storyline. It was one long tale with episodic things that would happen. You know, there would be certain events [that] would happen in this episode or this episode, so it was sort of an episodic quality to some of it. But it was telling a larger narrative, in terms of the story of those particular characters in that setting."

Disney has a lot of plans regarding the Star Wars franchise, so it’s tough to say whether Underworld could ever come to be. But there’s always room for more stories, and given that over 40 scripts were already written, a lot of the work is already done!

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h/t Bleeding Cool, Tech Radar