Before Star Wars became a jewel in Disney’s massive crown, there was a project that could have altered the course of the franchise in a big way. That project was called Star Wars: Underworld, a television series developed by George Lucas in the mid-2000s. As work on the prequels was wrapping up, Lucas wanted to explore the events of the galaxy that occurred between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope.

Ronald D. Moore, known for serving as writer and producer on Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager, as well as developing the Starz series Outlander, shared details about the unproduced Star Wars series with Collider. According to Moore, Lucas commissioned his team to pen close to 48 episode scripts. Said Moore:

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. Just much bigger than what you would normally do in a television show.”

Star Wars: Underworld would never come to pass. After the episodes were written, Lucas went to seek out ways to produce them. A few year laters, Lucas sold Lucasfilm to Disney, and the show was scrapped. Allegedly, the series would have had a “film noir” element to it, and the episodes would have all been connected to one overarching storyline. Man, that would have been cool. At least we got our big budget Star Wars companion series in the form of The Mandalorian.

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