Somewhere, 39 completed, official episodes of a Star Wars television show exist. A show George Lucas helped create. A show with Darth Vader, Han Solo, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and more. And yet, according to the show’s co-creator, odds are we’ll never get to see any of it.
That show is called Star Wars Detours and it was announced back in 2012. Co-created by the Robot Chicken team of Seth Green and Matthew Senreich, Detours was an officially licensed Star Wars animated comedy using characters from all the films up to that point. Lucas himself even gave his approval and consulted with Green and Senreich on the show.
Brief glimpses were released (as well as a description Gizmodo truly trashed at the time), but when Disney purchased Lucasfilm soon after the announcement, the show was shelved awaiting further actions. Now, in a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, Green says that’s kind of where things still are almost a decade later. “The most recent conversations I’ve had with anybody who would be in a position to say [Detours could be released] say that it’s not soon,” Green said.
There are a few reasons for this but Green says the main reason is that all of Disney’s new Star Wars content in the decade since has dated certain aspects of the show. “Well, there are 39 episodes that were finished for broadcast,” Green said, as well as 62 unproduced scripts. “But we finished them almost 10 years ago, and so there would have to be a bit of reconfiguring of the existing stuff to make it something that Disney+ would release as a Lucasfilm offering. And the way it’s been explained to me is that there hasn’t been enough interest high enough up to go through what it would take to put it out, and that there isn’t an interest in releasing this content on Disney+ from Lucasfilm.”
That’s mostly discouraging, of course, but a little bit encouraging in that it’s not what most fans assumed. From the brief glimpses fans got of Detours back in 2012, it was a very silly show, portraying Star Wars in ways fans weren’t used to seeing. “The other side of the stars, between the wars,” was one particular phrase. The prevailing assumption was Disney just deemed it too silly for its more serious brand. But apparently that’s not the only reason, a point bolstered by recent decisions to put similarly non-canon Star Wars content such as Droids and Ewoks on Disney+.
Green, a huge Star Wars fan who recently returned to voice Cad Bane’s droid Todo 360 on The Bad Batch, doesn’t seem too broken up about this though. In his mind, he feels he and the team made a good show, and it gave him a chance to work with his idol. “I don’t really have an emotional position because I got to spend four straight years making something with George Lucas,” Green said to EW.
“And my partner and I, and all of the people that got to work on it — the artists and actors and directors and animators — we all got to make something Star Wars with the guy who created it. And so I know over those four years that he was having fun, and that’s really all I care about. I got a priceless experience with one of my truest heroes, and got to see him laugh and enjoy all of the things that he had created, in a time before he agreed to sell them to somebody else.” Any Star Wars can understand that.
Leave a Reply