STAR WARS: UNDERWORLD TV Series - "It’s Empire Strikes Back on Steroids"

We all know George Lucas' Star Wars: Underworld TV series isn't going to happen anytime soon, but it's nice to get a little update here and there letting us know how things are progressing... or not progressing. In a recent interview, Lucasfilm producer Rick McCallum discusses the challenges they face in making an epic series like this and describes it as being The Empire Strikes Back on steroids. 

We know that 50 one hour scripts have been written, and that they've have gone through three drafts. McCallum previously described the sci-fi drama as being like The Godfather, with mob bosses and bounty hunters, saying,

Basically, it is like The Godfather; it’s the Empire slowly building up its power base around the galaxy, what happens in Coruscant, which is the major capital, and it’s a group of underground bosses who live there and control drugs, prostitution.

In this most recent interview with Collider (I aplogize for not adding this source within the article earlier) he discusses they challenges they face of getting badass looking visual effects done on a television budget, and how that is the biggest issue they currently face,

This is the best way to put it into perspective: we did Episode III—which is one of the larger of all the Star Wars films in relation to set construction, visual effects, the amount of visual effects and everything else—and that was made for $100 million which was unheard of even five years ago, because had it been made by any studio or anywhere in the United States it would have been easily double that price. So imagine an hour’s episode with more digital animation and more visual effects and more complicated in terms of set design and costume design than a two-hour movie that takes us three years to make, and we have to do that every week and we only have $5 million to do it. That’s our challenge.

It doesn't seem like this little road block is going to be cleared anytime soon,

It’s not a challenge that I think can be dealt with in the next year or two years, I think it’s gonna be a little bit more longer term goal.

He goes on to explain that the most expensive aspect of the series will be the CGI characters that Lucas has come up with,

[George has] come up with so many extraordinary digital characters that are onscreen for 30-40 minutes. Most people who love movies and kind of understand the process realize that if you do a character like Gollum or Jar Jar or any major digital character, that costs twice as much as having Tom Cruise in a movie. You get 150 people working for two years on a 40 minute performance and they all make serious money, you just add it up; that’s gonna be a serious $20-30 million character. That’s our problem, how do we get that down?

It makes you wonder exactly how in the hell they are going to figure that out, because it's a big issue. But that's not all they have to worry about, there's all the virtual sets as well,

[With] digital 3D matte paintings, how do we cut the time from 2-3 weeks to 2-3 days? On a television budget, on television screens it doesn’t have to be film res, but each one of these are major challenges for us. How do we get virtual set software? Because we can’t build any of this stuff. I mean we could do it if we did it in a traditional format where we have one set with all the characters, but George doesn’t work that way. We have 40-50 set pieces per hour, every minute and a half to two minutes there’s another set. Well we can’t build that and do that every week, that’s virtually impossible, so we have to come up with virtual set software and an environment that allows us to be able to do that on blue and green screen and be able to turn those backgrounds around really, really fast. We’re getting there, but it’s not perfect yet and it’s still too expensive.

It makes me wonder if it's even possible to do what they want to do, but if it gets done we can expect it to be awesome. It has the potential to better than Empire Strikes Back!

It’s much darker [than the movies]. It’s a much more adult series. I think, thematically, in terms of characters and what they go through, it will be…if we can ever get it together and George really wants to pursue it, it’ll be the most awesome part of the whole franchise, personally…It’s Empire Strikes Back on steroids.

Obviously, we changed it for where we couldn’t go in terms of language. It was to be serious performances, very complicated relationships, unbelievable issues of power and corruption, greed, vanity, pride, ego manifesting itself at levels that only equal the world that we live in now, but, as I said, on steroids.

I love how this series sounds, and I'm more excited about it than any of the other projects being developed over at Lucasfilm right now... that we know about. I just hope they can actually figure it all out so that they can finally move it into production! What do you all think?