A Star Wars comedy with 39 completed episodes has been locked away since 2013. Another 62 scripts were finished and waiting. Not one person outside Lucasfilm has seen any of it.
Next month, in a museum, that ends.
The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opens its doors in LA on September 22, 2026, founded by George Lucas alongside his wife, Mellody Hobson. Its remit is visual storytelling in every form it takes — paintings, comics, movies, TV and everything in between. Among the programming: public screenings of select Star Wars Detours episodes, which Seth Green confirmed during a panel at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con.
What Detours actually is
Among the final official Star Wars projects George Lucas created, Star Wars Detours came out of Lucasfilm Animation in collaboration with Robot Chicken‘s Seth Green and Matthew Senreich. It sits outside canon. The show is a parody in the vein of The Simpsons, taking place somewhere between Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith and the first Star Wars film, which was later renamed A New Hope.
The first footage went public at Star Wars Celebration 2012. A year later, in 2013, Lucasfilm shelved the series indefinitely — and 13 years passed.
What really hurts is the lineup of characters. Darth Vader, Emperor Palpatine, Princess Leia, Han Solo, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Jar Jar Binks all turn up, with voices supplied by a cast that includes Seth Green, Star Wars voice acting legend Dee Bradley Baker, Ahmed Best, Billy Dee Williams, and Seth MacFarlane in the role of Palpatine.
The timing was terrible
Disney closed its $4 billion acquisition of Lucasfilm in October 2012, only months after that Celebration panel. Work on a fresh trilogy started almost at once, paired with a tidying-up of Star Wars canon: everything in the Expanded Universe was relabelled Star Wars Legends, so that only Lucas’ six films and the Star Wars: The Clone Wars saga remained within Disney’s new continuity.
There was no room in that plan for a series built entirely around mocking Star Wars. The studio laid out its reasoning in a statement on StarWars.com dated March 11, 2013:
“Detours was conceived and produced before we decided to move forward with the new Star Wars trilogy, and in the wake of that decision, Lucasfilm has reconsidered whether launching an animated comedy prior to the launch of Episode VII makes sense. As a result, we’ve decided to postpone the release of Detours until a later date.”
Detours was not the only casualty. The Clone Wars got the axe after season 6 in 2014, before returning for a last season in 2020 on Disney+ — which tells you something. Disney also continues to sit on 60 Lucas-approved scripts for Star Wars: Underworld, an adult-oriented live-action series about the galaxy’s criminal underbelly in the period after Revenge of the Sith.
Why the museum screenings matter
No wider release of Detours is known to be in the works. Screenings, though, produce press coverage; coverage produces curiosity; and curiosity has brought back far odder things in this franchise.
The natural destination would be a “Star Wars Vintage” drop on Disney+, sitting alongside Droids, Ewoks and Genndy Tartakovsky’s Star Wars: Clone Wars. Disney+ has been unusually good for this brand for one reason: it gave Star Wars room to experiment with genre, tone and narrative approach, spanning The Mandalorian and Andor in live action through to Star Wars Rebels, Star Wars: The Bad Batch and, more recently, Star Wars: Maul – Shadow Lord. A parody would slot into that tradition easily enough.
Back in 2021, Green struck a downbeat note himself, suggesting Detours probably wouldn’t make it to Disney+ because bringing it up to the standard the franchise now sets for itself would demand too many resources. Nobody had a museum date at that point.
The 2027 window
2027 marks 50 years of Star Wars, and the planned celebrations already feature a wide release of Lucas’ unaltered 1977 theatrical cut — an outcome that seemed out of reach not long ago. If that is possible, so is a shelved comedy.
Director Todd Grimes, and everybody who poured years into those 39 episodes, has waited long enough. The doors open Tuesday, September 22.