Scrapped George Lucas Star Wars TV Show Was Written And Ready To Go

Benioff and Weiss detail their cancelled Star Wars trilogy, plus some Barside Buzz that there's still no script for the Rey sequel.

Remember back before the dark time, before the Disney Empire? There were reports that a George Lucas Star Wars TV show was coming along. To be fair, the show seemed to never actually materialize, although from what we hear now, I kinda wish it did. When Disney bought Lucasfilm in 2012 they threw out all Lucas’s ideas for the future, his sequel trilogy outline, along with this never made Star Wars TV show.

Now Ronald D. Moore has revealed to Collider just how far along this Star Wars TV show got. Moore was one of several writers hired to develop scripts for the scrapped show. It seems they scripted between 40 and 48 episodes before the project was cancelled by the Disney sale.

“I was one of several, there was a bunch of international writers they assembled… 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… It was great! It was a ball, it was a lot of fun.”

Wait, The Scripts Were Finished?

Moore then gets to what for me, was the most interesting part of this story. It seems like those scripts were actually completed for the entire show.

“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.”

Big-Budget TV

Moore went on to talk about how he was surprised that they were asked not to limit themselves by budget when writing.

“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. 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.”

Remember, back in these days, TV budgets were not quite as big as they are now. This was before the likes of Game of Thrones began to rewrite the narrative of what TV could pull off. It also sounds like the technology Lucas was developing is the same as was used on The Mandalorian to such effect.

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However, I think the detail that stands out to me most, is the script process. It’s very unusual and yet refreshing to hear of a show where the entire story was scripted prior to filming. It does seem like Lucas was willing to rectify the problems with the prequel trilogy, I.e. the scripting process. I like the idea of Lucas not actually writing, but just steering the writer’s room along. This sounds like a show I wish I’d seen in all honesty.

I do wonder whether Disney could resurrect this show at some point? If the scripts were in a completed state, how much would it take to adapt to the new canon? And as we know, The Mandalorian has proved to Disney that the technology works to make this show. One wonders how good this show could have been. I definitely respect Moore as a writer, and I loved the Battlestar Galactica reboot he oversaw.

Alas, I can’t see Disney going anywhere with the George Lucas Star Wars TV show. I simply struggle to have faith that Lucasfilm is being steered in the right direction. I hope I’m wrong.

What do you think of Moore’s comments? Would you also like to see the George Lucas Star Wars TV show? Leave your thoughts below if you got some.

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SOURCE: Collider

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