“There’s always a little bit of truth in legends,” Ahsoka once said on “Star Wars: Rebels.”
That line was a little Easter Egg to fans to assuage them about how the pre-Disney takeover “Star Wars” stories — told in decades-worth of novels, comics, and video games — might still live on in the official canon. It also applies a bit to the show “Star Wars: Underworld,” George Lucas‘s ambitious, but ultimately scrapped live-action TV series he was developing in the years after “Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith” hit theaters in 2005.
Little bits of information have leaked about the show over the years. One thing was certain: Per its title, it was set in the demimonde of the galaxy far, far away, among its scoundrels, and smugglers, and bounty hunters and assorted other criminals. But now Rick McCallum, the producer best associated with the “Star Wars” prequels, who oversaw the production of those films at Lucasfilm with Lucas himself directing, is opening up a bit more about what the series would have represented.
On the “Young Indy Chronicles” podcast — McCallum entered the Lucasfilm fold as a producer on the ’90s show, which arguably bears many tonal similarities to the prequels — the producer said that it “would’ve blown up the whole ‘Star Wars’ universe and Disney would’ve definitely never offered George to buy the franchise.”
IndieWire’s request for comment to Lucasfilm about this podcast have gone unanswered.
Part of that might have been simply due to the cost. He said on the podcast that they couldn’t figure out how to do each episode for less than $40 million (and if we know anything, the cost-conscience Disney isn’t willing to invest too much more in shows that go over budget — just look at “The Acolyte”). “The problem was that each episode was bigger than the films,” he said. “So the lowest I could get it down to with the each [installment] that existed then was $40 million an episode.”
McCallum also said that “These were dark. They were sexy. They were violent. They were absolutely wonderful, complicated, challenging scripts.” Over the years “Star Wars: Underworld” had been referred to as Lucas trying to do “The Sopranos” in “Star Wars.” And as time has elapsed since the show simply proved too expensive to make and a broadcast partner was never lined up, more details have emerged here and there.
Among them, “Star Trek” writer and “Battlestar Galactica” showrunner Ronald D. Moore, who went on to showrun “Outlander” instead, was one of the writers on “Underworld” — given the extraordinary complexity he gave “Galactica” as well as episodes of “The Next Generation,” “Deep Space Nine,” and his all-timer of a script with Brannon Braga for “Star Trek: First Contact,” the idea of him being involved in “Star Wars” is a “could have been” for the ages.
McCallum went so far as to say they had 60 episode scripts to at least the third-draft stage — it’s believed Lucas planned for the show to run over 100 episodes, much as he had planned for the “Star Wars: The Clone Wars” animated series that launched in 2008 — it achieved that feat, ultimately clocking in at 133 installments. He departed the company following the Disney acquisition in October 2012.
Getting back to the meaning of that Ahsoka quote that fans have always embraced: That the stories developed in “Star Wars” before Disney have always found a way of bubbling back somehow — just look at how the non-canon Grand Admiral Thrawn, introduced in a popular series of books in 1991, made his way into the official canon in the “Rebels” show and then “Ahsoka” itself. It’s believed that elements of “Underworld” may have popped up in the Disney properties that have been produced since and we just haven’t known it.
We do know “Rogue One” was a project pitched by VFX wiz John Knoll at Lucasfilm pre-Disney… might it have essentially been planned to be an elaborate “Underworld” installment? (Yahoo Entertainment claimed it was.) Germain Lussier at Slashfilm said “Underworld” would have explored Han Solo’s origins… might that have morphed into “Solo: A Star Wars Story”? Even the idea of focusing on the criminal underworld is something “Underworld” had in common with “The Mandalorian,” while “The Bad Batch” animated series and “Andor” went on to explore the same time period “Underworld” ostensibly would have.
“Underworld” seems like an incredible lost opportunity that was a few years ahead of its time. But we might have watched more of it than we realize.
