Here’s The Leaked Test Footage From George Lucas’s Abandoned Live-Action ‘Star Wars: Underworld’ Series

You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. You also can’t oversee a multi-billion dollar science fiction empire without dropping a few enticing what-ifs along the way. For ‘Star Wars‘ fans, one of the biggest what-ifs has been “Star Wars: Underworld,” a massive live-action series planned by George Lucas back in the early 2000s. Now, thanks to an unearthed batch of footage, fans can at least get a good look at what might’ve been.

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The footage recently uploaded to YouTube includes a VFX demo reel set in the back alleys of Coruscant, the capital planet of the ‘Star Wars’ universe. It also contains a brief behind-the-scenes feature comparing the green screen photography to the final product. As noted by Polygon, this video matches the ones uploaded to Stargate Studios’s Vimeo page (since removed). The demo reel and behind-the-scenes feature were seemingly there for seven and nine years, respectively. How did ‘Star Wars’ Twitter manage to miss prime footage for almost a decade, you ask? The world may never know.

‘Underworld’ was initially announced at the 2005 Celebration – the annual convention that draws ‘Star Wars’ fans from across the world – and quickly became one of Lucas’s most ambitious projects to date. Described by then-producer Rick McCallum as “‘Deadwood‘ in space,” “Underworld” had 50 hours of scripts lined up and was expected to dive into some of the darker corners of the ‘Star Wars’ universe. Lucas himself described the film as having a post-war, film noir kind of vibe.

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What ultimately killed ‘Underworld’ was its astronomical price tag. Back in 2011, Lucas admitted to Attack of the Show that his creative team was struggling to maintain the look and feel of the ‘Star Wars’ universe without spending the equivalent of a movie budget on each episode. “Right now, it looks like the ‘Star Wars’ features,” the director explained. “But we have to figure out how to make it at about a tenth of the cost of the features, because its television.” If HBO can spend $15 million per episode on “Game of Thrones,” it’s worth wondering what Lucas could’ve done now with an equivalent budget in 2010.