Series creator compares to the show's baddies to the "criminals and gangs" now "running Wall Street and the United States."

The Star Wars community first heard about George Lucas's plans for a live action television series somewhere around 2009, and waited on a fool's hope (or a purist's curse) for a pilot to appear. Additional news didn't arrive until an interview last May, wherein Georgey explained (somewhat confusingly) that he had fifty hours worth of scripts that weren't ready for production yet. The show is apparently on hold until the cost of special effects work lowers, but that hasn't stopped the show's producer, Rick McCallum, from dropping some details that include the show's working title: Star Wars: Underworld.

"It's underneath what's going on," explained McCallum, describing the premise. "It's [about] the criminals and the gangs. The guys who are running Wall Street, basically. The guys who are running the United States."

Though McCallum's statements may seem somewhat tuned to the current Occupy protests, he holds that the overarching ideas are far from fleeting. "They're timeless," he said, speaking of the fifty or so episodes already penned. "They take place between Episode III and Episode IV. That 20 year period when Luke is growing up. It's not about Luke, but it's about that period when the Empire is trying to take things [over]."

Though the series is still on indefinite hold, McCallum is still extremely enthused about its future. "We have fifty of the most unbelievable scripts," he said. "Each one hour episode is bigger than any of the prequels were. And they're complex, they're dark, they're adult ... But right now, technologically there's no way that we can do them for the five million dollar mark [per episode]; which would be the maximum that we could do. That is because there is so much digital animation, because we have so many digital characters. I think the idea is that we just hold off [and] wait and see if there are any major breakthroughs in the next year or two."

Like all things Star Wars post-1983, I will be waiting with reserved excitement for the next installment on the unlikely chance that something other than a videogame will ever be able to get things right again. Regardless, it seems like a minimum of two years before this appears on our televisions and, remember, that's just the first iteration of the show. Lucas will then, understandably, need to spend years changing important plot points, adding digital blinking, altering sound effects, and re-releasing it in 3D. Hell, we might not see the "real" version until 2020.

Source: ComingSoon.net