With all of the big ‘Star Wars’ news and releases of late, it is hard to remember a time when the most exciting rumors about the franchise was a supposed live-action show that George Lucas and his team claimed had been in development for years. Now, new information has surfaced about that live-action series and what it would have been about, beyond just the fact that it would have showcased the gangsters and criminal elements in the seedy underbelly of Coruscant, the Republic’s capital city-planet.
In a recent interview conducted by Venture Beat with Cory Balrog, current director of the ‘God of War’ game series, and former employee of Lucasarts, who was very involved in the process of creating a video game that would tie in with the potential ‘Star Wars’ television series, new information is discussed about the heart of the new series, which surprisingly enough, would have told us the story of a young Emperor Palpatine:
“[We] started looking at some examples from television and movies, mostly television — television is this great format where people can have a relationship with characters for an extended period of time. During that time, a character can go from one extreme to another. They can go from a character you loathe to a character you love and root for.
Probably the really small beginnings of this idea, the germination of this — when I was working at Lucas, I was allowed to go up to the ranch and read the scripts for the [canceled live-action Star Wars] TV show. It was the most mind-blowing thing I’d ever experienced. I cared about the Emperor. They made the Emperor a sympathetic figure who was wronged by this f***ing heartless woman. She’s this hardcore gangster, and she just totally destroyed him as a person. I almost cried while reading this. This is the Emperor, the lightning out of the fingers Emperor. That’s something magical. The writers who worked on that, guys from ‘The Shield’ and ’24,’ these were excellent writers.”
Can you imagine a series like this? It would have been like ‘Breaking Bad,’ except the Emperor would have been Walter White, and we would have seen his devolution into the tyrannical madman who would one day wipe out the Jedi and rule the galaxy. It might have been cool, or it might have ruined the franchise, as yet another villain would have been given a tragic backstory, thus making it harder to rejoice when they finally met justice for their evil actions. What are your thoughts on the matter? Would you have tuned in to watch Palpatine’s rise to power? Could you have sympathized with the man? Share your thoughts in the comments section below!
