On a recent episode of streaming chat show The George Lucas Talk Show, platinum-selling rock parodist “Weird Al” Yankovic revealed that he had written a rock opera for a Star Wars show that never saw the light of day. The show was Star Wars: Detours, a CGI comedy show about events in the Star Wars universe set between Episode III: The Revenge of the Sith and Episode IV: A New Hope. The show was created by Seth Green and Matthew Senreich, the creative team behind Robot Chicken, and produced by Lucasfilm Animation.
Yankovic described the episode as, “There were, gosh, at least a half a dozen or more songs as part of the musical and the various characters in the show. We actually recorded them singing their songs, and that was about a week before we found out that the show was not happening.”
Thirty-nine episodes of the show had been completed when the 2012 sale of Lucasfilm to Disney halted production and led to cancellation of the show. Yankovic had been involved in the show since its inception, playing a bounty-hunter in a sketch that he leaked on Twitter in 2020:
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly last year, show co-creator Green was asked if Detours would ever see the light of day. He responded, “(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.”
The George Lucas Talk Show is a comedy Zoom series that began as a live comedy show at an improv theater in New York City. It’s hosted by improvisor Connor Ratliff in character as Star Wars creator George Lucas, and cohosted by comic actor Griffin Newman as the prequel series character Watto.