A Shelved George Lucas Comedy Series Finally Gets an Audience — 13 Years Later

29 days ago by Kael Voss 4 min read

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Thirteen years after Disney's acquisition of Lucasfilm quietly buried it, Star Wars Detours is finally getting seen. Six full episodes of George Lucas's shelved animated comedy series screen to the public starting September 22 at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art — not on Disney+, not as a streaming drop, but in a museum theater.

Somewhere in a Lucasfilm vault, thirty-nine finished episodes of a Star Wars sitcom have been sitting untouched since 2013. Most fans have never seen a frame of it. That changes this month.

What Detours Actually Is

Star Wars Detours was George Lucas's own idea — a non-canon animated comedy series co-created with Seth Green and Matthew Senreich, the team behind Robot Chicken, built around the pitch of "The Simpsons but it's Star Wars." Think Original Trilogy characters dropped into sitcom-style bits and workplace-comedy absurdity: Luke and Han bickering over roommate chores, Jabba running a talk show, that kind of gleefully irreverent tone Lucas rarely got to indulge on screen himself. It was fully in production, with a full season's worth of episodes actually completed, when Disney bought Lucasfilm in October 2012. Within months, the project was shelved indefinitely. Thirty-nine finished episodes, animated, voiced, scored — just gone from public view, for thirteen years.

That's the part of this story that stings the most if you're the kind of fan who tracks lost media: this wasn't a script that got cancelled in development. It was a finished show. Green has talked for over a decade about wanting it seen, and the fear, in the immediate aftermath of the Disney deal, was real: a project this tonally weird, this far outside the "prestige saga" lane Lucasfilm has mostly stuck to since 2012, looked like exactly the kind of thing that gets quietly written off and never mentioned again.

Why the Lucas Museum, Not Disney+

That it's surfacing at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art rather than as a Disney+ curiosity drop tells you everything about how Lucasfilm still classifies this project. The museum opens to the public September 22, and six full episodes — eighteen segments in total — will screen on rotation in its dedicated theaters, included with general admission, no separate ticket required. It's being treated the way you'd treat a piece of film history in an archive, not the way you'd treat a marketable new release. That's probably the right call: Detours was explicitly built as broad, silly comedy, tonally miles from the Andor-and-Ahsoka seriousness Lucasfilm has leaned into under Dave Filoni. Slotting it into a museum context, alongside the rest of George Lucas's own personal archive of work, frames it honestly as "here's something Lucas himself wanted to make" rather than trying to sell it as the next big Disney+ hit.

The Legends-Era Instinct, Vindicated

There's a version of Star Wars fandom that's spent years arguing Lucasfilm should do more to preserve and surface the weirder, non-canon corners of this franchise's history instead of treating everything outside the current continuity as disposable. Detours is about as strong a case for that argument as exists: a genuinely finished, Lucas-approved project that sat in a vault for over a decade purely because of a corporate transition, not because anyone involved thought it was bad. Getting even six of thirty-nine episodes in front of the public is a real, if incomplete, win for that argument. It's also, frankly, overdue — thirteen years is a long time to sit on completed animation featuring a filmmaker's own creative vision for his own galaxy.

What This Doesn't Answer

Six episodes out of thirty-nine leaves the obvious question hanging: does the rest ever surface? Nothing in this announcement promises a full release, a streaming rollout, or even a timeline for showing the remaining episodes. This could be the full extent of Detours' public life — a rotating museum exhibit for as long as the Lucas Museum runs it — or it could be a toe in the water ahead of something bigger. Given how quietly this project has been handled for over a decade, I'd treat any expectation of a full Disney+ release as unconfirmed at best.

Why This Matters Anyway

Whatever happens with the other thirty-three episodes, the fact that any of this is finally watchable by the public is worth celebrating on its own. This is George Lucas's own comedic instinct for his own creation, finished and shelved by circumstance rather than judgment, getting an actual audience after thirteen years. For a franchise that treats its own history as carefully as Star Wars does, that's a genuinely rare thing to get right. May the Force be with whoever's running the projector in that museum theater — they're showing something a lot of us assumed we'd never see.