A long time ago–2012 to be exact–in a galaxy not so far away, Star Wars was on the verge of having a long laugh at itself. Announced at Star Wars Celebration in 2012, Star Wars Detours was a project that saw Robot Chicken’s Seth Green and Matt Senreich team up with LucasFilm Animation to poke fun at the film series. Dozens of mini-episodes had been completed, scripts for another 62 shorts had been completed, and all that was needed was a date for the show to be broadcast. So what happened to Star Wars Detours? Disney.
A few months after Star Wars Detours was announced, Disney announced that it had purchased the entire Star Wars franchise from creator George Lucas for over $4 billion at the time, which resulted in numerous Star Wars projects being shelved so that all efforts could be focused on a new trilogy of films and animated series. With Disney+ having launched, Detours seemed like a perfect fit for the new streaming service. But according to Green, it’s a little bit more complicated than simply uploading all the episodes online and letting people know about them.
“Well, there are 39 episodes that were finished for broadcast,” Green said to EW. “But we finished them almost 10 years ago, and so there would have to be a bit of reconfiguring of the existing stuff to make it something that Disney+ would release as a Lucasfilm offering. And 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.”
Green isn’t too sad about Detours never seeing the light of day though, as the experience of having worked alongside George Lucas for several years while making the series more than made up for Detours being canceled before it even made it to television.
“We all got to make something Star Wars with the guy who created it,” Green added. “And so I know over those four years that he was having fun, and that’s really all I care about. I got a priceless experience with one of my truest heroes, and got to see him laugh and enjoy all of the things that he had created, in a time before he agreed to sell them to somebody else.”
This wasn’t Green’s only involvement in the Star Wars universe. Before the Disney acquisition, Robot Chicken’s series of Star Wars specials were well-received riffs on the franchise, and Green returned to the recording booth in 2017 for Star Wars Rebels–and more recently–to reprise his role as Cad Bane’s service droid Todo 360 for Star Wars: The Bad Batch. As for Detours, it’ll have some company soon as the planned Mandalorian spinoff Rangers of the New Republic is no longer in active development.
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