After more than a decade, one of the lost Star Wars
projects that will probably never be seen by anyone has received a surprising acknowledgment from Lucasfilm as they celebrated 20 years of Lucasfilm Animation. The project in question is the animated comedy series Star Wars: Detours
, which was created by the team who brought the world Robot Chicken but was never released despite almost 40 episodes being completed and dozens of other scripts being written.
Detours’ surprising reappearance came thanks to a small reference in a poster released by Lucasfilm which incorporates characters from their many animated shows and movies, including those from The Clone Wars and Rebels, and, somehow, Detours. Fans of the world’s biggest franchises always love a good Easter egg or two making an appearance, and the poster offered up one of the most obscure of any Star Wars references you could name by including a very unorthodox-looking Stormtrooper with big googly eyes crumpled up in the bottom right of the poster, as seen in the locked away series.
What Was ‘Star Wars: Detours’ About and Will It Ever Be Released?
It is hard to imagine a series from one of the biggest franchises in the world just sitting there with almost 40 episodes of a brand-new series ready to go, but they will most likely remain locked away like a Disney Princess languishing in a tower under the control of an overbearing and domineering guardian. However, back in 2012 – just before Disney swooped in to make one of the biggest studio purchases in their history – Lucasfilm were exploring different Star Wars projects, and one of those came from the mind of Seth Green and Matt Senreich.
Star Wars: Detours was announced at the 2012 Star Wars Celebration event, and with George Lucas backing the show, it seemed that there was nothing that could stop it making it to air and bringing a self-mocking comedy series to the Star Wars franchise. However, Disney’s take-over of Lucasfilm changed many things, and one was the shelving of Detours despite so many episodes being completed and a trailer for the series being released.
Related
Why Disney Needs to Release Star Wars Detours
Although Lucasfilm has continued to release many new Star Wars titles on Disney+, there are a few rare pieces of older content that have to be added.
Back in 2021, Green addressed his most recent conversations about the project with Lucasfilm and Disney. His comments were not exactly encouraging, and as the series is still unreleased, it seems that those not holding their breath to see the show have been proven right in their decision. At the time, Green said:
“The most recent conversations I’ve had with anybody who would be in a position to say so say that it’s not soon… There are 39 episodes that were finished for broadcast. 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.”
What everyone wants to know now is whether the small but very visible inclusion of a reference to the series in Lucasfilm’s celebratory poster is a sign that perhaps there is just a small glimmer of hope that somewhere, somehow, Detours could still become part of the Star Wars universe.
Source: X/Lucasfilm
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
