Leaked test footage for Star Wars: Underworld shows off George Lucas’s scrapped TV series

When The Mandalorian was announced, Lucasfilm made a big fuss about it being the first live-action Star Wars TV series. If original franchise creator George Lucas had had his way though, that honour would have gone to Star Wars: Underworld. First announced way back in 2005 and developed for nearly a decade, Underworld was supposed to be a deviation from bright and shiny Jedi adventures and instead take us into the seedy criminal underbelly of this galaxy far, far away in the time between the prequel and original trilogies.

The show was described as everything from “dark and gritty” to “Sopranos in space”, with Lucas himself claiming it had a film noir vibe to it. Whatever it was, Lucas and his producing partners (which included Ronald D. Moore and Rick McCallum) spent a lot of time working on it. With over 100 one-hour-long episodes planned, extensive artwork and set designs were done and 50 scripts were written and in the can. Only for everything to fall apart when Lucas and co realised that it would just cost way too much money (rumours suggested up to $50 million per episode) to bring their vision to life at the level of quality Star Wars fans would demand. And so Star Wars: Underworld faded into memory. Until last night.

That’s when a video popped up on the internet and quickly started making the rounds. Allegedly leaked test footage (the source is still unconfirmed and I have my own doubts as to its veracity), this 10-minute long clip shows us a Blade Runner-esque scene set in the lower levels of Coruscant. As early test footage usually does, this clip has very obvious green-screening and pretty bad dialogue, acting, and action (just wait until you see the shootout where people are firing point-blank at each other and missing), but it’s a pretty neat approximation of what Lucas had planned. Equally as intriguing is the latter half of the video which shows off a look behind the scenes of this footage. Utilizing real-time on-set CG rendering that was pretty high-tech for 2010, it’s actually very cool to see how this whole thing was made. That’s if it’s real, of course. Check it out below and decide for yourself.

Last Updated: January 31, 2020