Star Wars: Detours has been sitting in a vault since 2013. Thirty-nine finished episodes, another sixty-two scripts written and never produced, and almost nobody outside Lucasfilm has seen it.
That's all about to change next month...
Seth Green announced at San Diego Comic-Con last month that a selection of episodes will be shown at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which is currently slated to open September 22nd in Los Angeles.
"We made a show with George, an animated series," Green told the panel. "It's called Detours, and there's going to be a curation of episodes from that show on display for the public." That means a museum screening program with a rotating selection, running in the building's theaters.
George Lucas came up with Detours. The pitch, more or less, was The Simpsons set in the Star Wars universe, and he brought in Green and Matthew Senreich to make it because they'd been doing exactly that on Robot Chicken for years. Their Stoopid Buddy Stoodios team built the whole thing.
Then Disney bought Lucasfilm in 2012, and in March 2013 the call came down that they felt a broad animated comedy was the wrong way to reintroduce the franchise while a serious sequel trilogy was in development, and the series was parked.
Felicia Day confirmed it was properly dead by 2015, and Green said in 2021 that nobody was interested in putting it on Disney+.
Almost two seasons of television, fully animated and fully voiced, that nobody has ever watched.
The voice cast was nothing to laugh at (pun intended). Seth MacFarlane, Weird Al Yankovic, Andy Richter, and Billy Dee Williams and Anthony Daniels reprising Lando and C-3PO. Lucasfilm premiered footage publicly at Star Wars Celebration VI in 2012 with a release plan attached.
The museum launch has shifted dates multiple times… Initially it was 2021, then 2023, then 2025, and now September 2026, with the pandemic and supply-chain problems taking the blame. The current date came from the museum itself back in November, so it's holding, for now...
"Publicly viewable" also isn't quite the same as "released." You'd have to physically go to Los Angeles and sit in the museum's theater. There's been no announcement of a wider release, and Green has been consistent with the 39/62 numbers since 2013.
One episode has already escaped. A six-minute short with Weird Al Yankovic and Andy Richter voicing Zuckuss and 4-LOM leaked online in November 2020 and got pulled within days. September would be the first time anyone gets to watch with Lucasfilm's blessing.
The museum opens September 22nd, and until somebody walks out of that theater and tells us what they saw, thirty-nine episodes of Star Wars remain the biggest finished thing in the franchise nobody can watch.
Would you make the trip for it?
Sound off in the comments below!