Test footage from the canceled TV show Starwars Underworld has surfaced on YouTube. The show, which George Lucas apparently wanted to make 100 episodes, first screened after the release of Revenge of the Sith in 2005, and was officially discontinued in 2010 due to budget cuts. It shows Star Wars as you've never seen it before: a Blade Runner or Cyberpunk 2077 vision of Coruscant with bright lights, flying cars, and an underground resistance movement forming against the Empire. Citizens going to desperate measures to stop the Empire, it might as well remind you a bit of Saw Gerrera's fighters in Rogue One. See for yourself: There's about five minutes of test footage and five minutes showing how the short film was made. This was probably created as a proof of concept: the aforementioned effects studio, Stargate, worked on everything from the Jennifer Lopez movie Hustlers to the ABC show The Walking Dead. Polygon notes that it's actually been on the effects studio's Vimeo page for nine years, but this is the first time most people have seen it. In the meantime, quiz footage and sequencing has been removed from Vimeo, so it may not spend much time on the internet.
Star Wars through cyberpunk
It's rumored that 50 to 100 scripts were written for Star Wars: Underworld, and you can see why the television landscape of the late 2000s wasn't ready for a show like this. It sounds very expensive, and it was from the days before "Peak TV" where budgets for TV shows would rise in an arms race between streaming services and major networks. It's a very different proposition from something like The Mandalorian, which, even with its quieter adventures on usually empty planets, would cost €15 million per episode. So the idea that anyone doing 50 episodes of a show set in a cyberpunk world at this level seems unlikely even now. After Disney bought Lucasfilm, discussions of Underworld have pretty much disappeared. The acquisition coincided with the cancellation of the third-person shooter Star Wars 1313, which is said to have explored a similar part of the universe. The show would have featured Emperor Palpatine in some capacity, according to a 2016 interview with God of War creative director Cory Barlog. The scripts for Star Wars: Underworld really helped inspire this game, widely considered one of the biggest blockbusters of the last generation. So at least Underworld's demise wasn't entirely in vain.