Ten years before the Mandalorian blasted his way on to the TV screen, we almost got Star Wars: Underworld. The footage from a Star Wars TV show was recently posted on YouTube showing an early test for the series. The show would have been set in the underworld of Coruscant.
The test footage doesn’t have much of a plot other than a woman receiving secret information from a street vendor in the underbelly of the Empire’s capital city-planet. Then stormtroopers pursue her to another shop where an A-Team-esque gun battle erupts. Many shots are fired, but no one is hit. Even a stormtrooper should be able to hit a person ten feet away, but I digress.
The footage is reportedly from Stargate Studios, a renowned American production studio with offices around the world. Stargate Studios has worked on many TV shows including The Walking Dead, Doctor Who, and Heroes.
Early concepts for Star Wars: Underworld date back even earlier. Lucasfilm announced at the 2005 Star Wars Celebration that they were working on plans to develop a live-action TV series. The show would focus on events between the prequels and the original trilogy. According to reports, the show would have consisted of 100 one-hour episodes, each costing around $50 million a pop.
It appears that Lucasfilm enlisted Stargate Studios to help develop a cheaper way to create the visual effects for the series and get the cost down to about $5-10 million an episode. Underworld was still being considered up to at least 2015, which was three years after Lucasfilm was bought by Disney. Ultimately, the show was abandoned.
VIDEO GAME TIE-IN
Star Wars: Underworld was also going to have a tie-in with a video game titled Star Wars: 1313, which was set on Level 1313 of Coruscant.
It’s too bad Underworld was never developed. Exploring the cyberpunk-ish underbelly of Coruscant would have made for an interesting show. Especially if Underworld had explored the day-to-day Keystone Cops antics of stormtroopers like the biker scouts bantering in Chapter 10 of The Mandalorian.
TEST FOOTAGE
Here’s the test footage which runs about five minutes. It’s followed by a “making of” that demonstrates the technology used through picture-in-picture visuals, which looks pretty good for a TV show being shot in 2010.
