To listen to Rick McCallum inform it, “Star Wars: Underworld” would have been an enormous shift in tone for the franchise — a high-caliber, prestige-tier TV sequence that handled all types of difficult concepts. The information that 60 scripts (presumably a number of seasons) had been written and revised means that there is a entire different Star Wars saga on the market someplace.
“Phenomenal group of expertise,” McCallum mentioned throughout his look on Younger Indy Chroniclers. (McCallum additionally produced “The Younger Indiana Jones Chronicles” for Lucas.) “And these have been darkish. These weren’t, you already know, they have been horny, they have been violent, they have been simply completely fantastic, fantastic, difficult, difficult, I imply it could have blown up the entire Star Wars universe. And Disney positively would have by no means supplied to George to purchase this.”
If that sounds formidable, it clearly was. Whereas McCallum known as the sequence falling aside “one of many nice disappointments of our lives,” he admitted that it was too grand of a pitch to feasibly make for TV on the time. “The issue was, every episode was greater than the movies,” the producer mentioned. “The bottom I may get it all the way down to, with the know-how that existed then, was about $40 million an episode.”
Talking of know-how, Lucas wished to push the envelope even additional than he had with the Star Wars prequel trilogy. “Battlestar Galactica” showrunner Ron Moore, who was also a member of the writing squad who worked on “Star Wars: Underworld,” once said that Lucas “wanted to do a lot of cutting edge technological stuff with CG and virtual sets and so on,” and this was lengthy earlier than The Volume existed, so it boggles the thoughts to consider what may need been developed round that point if every part had labored out.
Again then, HBO was the definitive title in big-budget tv, so McCallum and Lucas went there to debate the concept. There was actual motion on the challenge, they usually began on the lookout for a European associate for co-production. Sadly, shakeups at HBO led to the talks being dropped, and there was no different actual possibility on the time for a manufacturing of that magnitude.
