Although The Mandalorian is the first live-action Star Wars TV show, there were already plans for such a show fourteen years earlier. However, those ideas were more advanced than previously thought, as footage has now been found on YouTube.
Stormtroopers, blaster battles, even the Wilhelm scream. The clip contains all the ingredients a Star Wars fan would expect from a live-action TV show. In the footage, we see a mysterious woman walking around Coruscant with the initial plans for the Star Destroyer. She tries to secure it with the Rebels while Stormtroopers search for her. Eventually, the enemy forces find her, triggering a blaster fight. That gunfight alone is reason enough to watch the footage; they bring a new dimension to the ‘Stormtroopers can’t aim’ joke.
According to the YouTube uploader, this is test footage from 2010 from the canceled TV series Underworld. The series should have been set after the events of Episode III. The also canceled shooter 1313 would share events with the series. Underworld was never released due to the high cost associated with each episode. The sale of Lucasfilm to Disney would also have played a role.
The footage was presumably never intended for release, but to showcase Stargate Studios’ real-time rendering technology. This company should have produced the series together with Lucasfilm and has worked on Doctor Who, The Walking Dead and The Orville in the past. The YouTube clip also shows behind-the-scenes footage of Underworld.
According to Polygon, the two fragments – the test footage and the making of – have been online on Stargate Studios’ Vimeo page for some time, but have only now been discovered and shared en masse. Stargate has since taken the Vimeo images offline. The site goes on to say that George Lucas had written 50 scripts for the TV series. It is unknown whether multiple scenes were also shot.