Star Wars TV show, Underworld, was an ambitious project which was set to be the first live-action series set in a Galaxy Far, Far Away. Dozens of scripts were written, but making it proved to be a major challenge for Lucasfilm, and it fell by the wayside alongside a number of other small screen projects when Disney acquired the studio.
Recently, Collider caught up with writer and producer Ronald D. Moore, and he shed a little more light on plans for Underworld, including the fact that budget constraints were never an issue.
"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," he continues. "Just much bigger than what you would normally do in a television show."
Asked to shed some light on the story of the series, Moore chose his words carefully, but confirmed that it was meant to be one overarching storyline from the start of the show until the end.
"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."
It sounds like George Lucas really did have something special planned for Underworld, but it's unlikely to ever see the light of day, unless the Disney-owned Lucasfilm were to adapt it into a comic book series or animated TV show? That's doubtful, but stranger things have definitely happened.
Are you guys disappointed that this Star Wars series never saw the light of day?