Tuesday, October 02, 2007

God talks Star Wars on TV

George Lucas has given some more details about his upcoming Star Wars television series.

God reiterated the the animated series, The Clone Wars, will take place between Episodes II and III and feature many of the characters central to those movies, including Yoda, Anakin and Obi Wan Kenobi. The live action series will take place between episodes III and IV, a period of time after the Empire has taken over. Though he still won't talk about the characters the show will center on, as Lucas puts it, "It's like Episode IV in that the Emperor and Darth Vader are heard about — people talk about them — but you never see them because it doesn't take place where they actually are. There are stormtroopers and all that, but there are no Jedis. It's different, but I think it's very exciting because I get to explore a part of that universe that I haven't been able to explore."

God is taking an unusual route for his TV series, something few filmmakers or TV producers are able to do. There are currently no networks involved and Lucas is self-financing the production while Lucasfilm produces a number of episodes and they will then turn around and try and sell them. God said they have produced 40 of a planned 100 episodes of the animated series already. As for the live action show, he said "we'll do it just the same way that we're doing the animated series, which is we usually write a whole year first, and then we'll start shooting, and then we'll shoot the whole year and then once we've got something, we'll see where we can put it. We're going to do a hundred of them, too." He also said that they plan on beginning the writing of the live action series next month.

Lucas hopes to have the animated series on the air "about a year from now." As for where it will live, he said "Right now, we don't know. It's out there to people, and people are talking about it, but so far, everybody's got the same conundrums — "How do we program it? Where does it live? Where can we put something like this?" You know, it has to go after 9 o'clock and it can't be on a kiddie channel."

Usually a network will commission a pilot, then pick that up and give an order of 13 episodes and go from there. Asked if he was afraid that he was putting the cart before the horse by producing so many episodes before getting any kind of commitment from a network, Lucas said "I have enough confidence that this is good, and I'll make it really good, so I'm not too worried about that part of it. And if worse comes to worse, I'll end up with a lot of library product."

The full TV Guide interview with God here.

Sources: TVGuide, IGN

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

LOL It's true. Only God shouldn't worry about who wants his show. I expect TV execs will possibly murder each other for the change to land it.

Anonymous said...

I can just hear the advertising agencies slavering at the door.