Before The Mandalorian and before Disney bought Lucasfilm, there was another Star Wars TV show in the works and Battlestar Galactica creator Ronald D. Moore has discussed what it was like to work on the show with Collider.
Moore told Collider that a team of writers, including some outside the US, met up at Skywalker Ranch every six to eight weeks with Lucas to break story ideas. Lucas would then offer feedback on the scripts before writers went off for another draft. “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.”
Lucas ultimately ended up selling Lucasfilm “a year or something after” the writing was complete, according to Moore.
“It was an extraordinary undertaking for someone to do. 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 new what was theoretically possible on a production budget.” The show was heavy on action and big set pieces, way outside of the league of TV at the time.
Sadly, it wasn’t to be, but it’s not impossible it could resurface down the line as Disney tries to get the most out of the Star Wars universe. Underworld was due to be set between Episodes III and IV.
Who knows what is around the corner and this series may yet resurface at some point in the future, especially as The Mandalorian and The Clone Wars have proved so popular on Disney+ — fingers crossed!
