Star Wars: Underworld – New Details On George Lucas’ Canceled TV Series

To hear Rick McCallum tell it, “Star Wars: Underworld” would have been a huge shift in tone for the franchise — a high-caliber, prestige-tier TV series that dealt with all kinds of complicated ideas. The knowledge that 60 scripts (presumably multiple seasons) had been written and revised means that there’s a whole other Star Wars saga out there somewhere.

“Phenomenal group of talent,” McCallum said during his appearance on Young Indy Chroniclers. (McCallum also produced “The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles” for Lucas.) “And these were dark. These were not, you know, they were sexy, they were violent, they were just absolutely wonderful, wonderful, complicated, challenging, I mean it would have blown up the whole Star Wars universe. And Disney definitely would have never offered to George to buy this.”

If that sounds ambitious, it clearly was. While McCallum called the series falling apart “one of the great disappointments of our lives,” he admitted that it was too grand of a pitch to feasibly make for TV at the time. “The problem was, each episode was bigger than the films,” the producer said. “The lowest I could get it down to, with the technology that existed then, was about $40 million an episode.”

Speaking of technology, Lucas wanted to push the envelope even further 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 long before The Volume existed, so it boggles the mind to think about what might have been developed around that time if everything had worked out.

Back then, HBO was the definitive name in big-budget television, so McCallum and Lucas went there to discuss the idea. There was real movement on the project, and they started looking for a European partner for co-production. Unfortunately, shakeups at HBO led to the talks being dropped, and there was no other real option at the time for a production of that magnitude.