Saga The Original Sequel Trilogy (original story ideas, treatments, interviews, concepts, etc. by Lucas)

I have a link for you to prove that:
Sam Witwer’s interview with Geekly Bubble, where you can hear him say “Filoni said ‘Lucas said you (Maul) survive ‘The Clone Wars’” (timemark 12:58): https://thewookieegunner.com/2017/04/06/geeky-bubble-episode-75-sam-witwer-interview/.

 

I really wish episodes 7-9 delved more into the midichlorians and the Whills. I'm very curious what kind of story George Lucas was hoping to tell with the ST.

 

Where did you hear about Pirates and their being no Imperial Remnant faction? Do you have any sources? I've heard there was a Neo-Imperialist faction planned, but it came from second hand account so not too sure of the its validity.

I've seen seveal mentions of Uber recently on this forum, but I'm surpised I've never heard of it before. Does anyone have more info on this?

I've got a bit of a small project going on to try and piece together the George Lucas outlines as best I can so any sources of interviews, information leaked about it, or info on the Original Sequel Trilogy Lucas had planned before Return of the Jedi would help.

From what I've heard about the George Lucas's Sequel Trilogy and some conjecture based on George Lucas interviews and earlier plans for the George Lucas Sequel Trilogy I definitely see pieces of it scattered throughout the Sequel Trilogy we got, but it's like someone putting a bunch of dinosaur bone and mixing them with the bones from other dinosaurs. None of these pieces make sense, or work without being part of the greater context of the story they originated from.

 

"There were pirates in [the treatment], but I won’t go into it beyond that." - Pablo Hidalgo, December 2016

As for no imperial remnant, it has been confirmed many times that it was JJ and Kasdan's idea to have it, which makes it something not part of the treatment. Hidalgo confirmed it, but I believe it's also in the art book.

Unfortunately, there's not much info to begin with.

Indeed. There's not much point in trying to discern from Disney's ST what might have come from the treatments or not since if anything came from it is inherently distorted from its original meaning. When it comes to Lucas' ST, it's better to approach it as something else altogether to avoid any possible speculation or misreading.

 

I heard he offered a lot of great tidbits about George Lucas's Sequel Treatments, but unfortunately he's often deleted them and he's nuked his Twitter.... again.

I don't think it's entirely fruitless. I think some ideas and concepts from the movies in conjunction with other details and ideas from interviews, what's been said of earlier plans and what we just know about Star Wars could glean some interesting insights and conjecture.

I kind of viewed this project as a paleontological effort. You have to work with the bits of bones you have to construct something, the leaks, the shared tidbits, what's been said about them in interviews. Then you have to look at the extinct relatives and what we know about them and this George's original plans for the Sequels before Return of the Jedi. It's pretty clear some of its ideas made it into his treatments and movies. Then we can also look at it's living relatives the films George Lucas actually made and the interviews about the themes, ideas and creative process behind them and how that would likely effect the movie. Then last, but not least the Sequel Trilogy we have. We know it has bones from GL's Sequel, but we're not entirely sure, but when we take everything else together we might be able to decipher which ones even if we're still not sure what they truly looked like and how they fit. I definitely feel like DJ was pushing a themes, or atleast ideas that likely came from the Lucas outlines.
The George Lucas outlines themselves would be like finding a complete and intact skeleton of the story, but even then you wouldn't have everything. You're still missing meat, skin, and behavior. Things change in production of movie and the visuals and audio help to tell the story and can change the perspective of something written. Still it can't hurt to bring together what we have and try to piece a trilogy together and figure out what this animal looked like and behaved even if it isn't perfect.

 

I wonder who Talon’s boss was. Was it a Sidious puppet like Rise of Skywalker revealed Snoke to be?

 

Much of the information about Lucas’s sequel plans also comes fromThe Art of the Force Awakens, which includes art and information from the very early stages of development.

Space pirates were indeed one of the first things the concept artists set to work on, though they were exploring visuals rather than storylines. The idea for a neo-Imperialist faction was also indeed not there until Abrams took charge of the project.

I’m not sure how big a role the pirates would have played. I honestly suspect that the Nihil from the High Republic storylines might be an adaptation of whatever concepts Lucas had planned for his pirates. Indeed, there is a chance that whole storyline could reuse concepts from the bare-bones sequel treatment.

One of my reasons for saying this is the intriguing inclusion of what look like dark-side monsters in the concept art for the High Republic. These remind me of the depiction of the dark side by Iain McCaig in the concept piece where it is manipulating the character based on Talon. Granted, it’s the same artist. But Star Wars does take a lot of its cues from what artists present.

My impression is that the dark side of the Cosmic Force would have perhaps taken a more central role in the story. We know the trilogy would have explored the Whills, which seem to have been essentially equivalent with the Cosmic Force. This aspect of the Force, in turn, is much like the celestial gods of mythologies who do not concern themselves much with terrestrial or mundane matters, but rather focus on grander things, like the destinies of millions.

My interpretation of these tidbits is that in Lucas’s story, with the Sith destroyed, the dark side itself, or the Whills who are a part of it, the dark gods essentially, would have been attempting to reassert its power by corrupting Force wielders to create a new order. I suspect the pirates would have been among its agents, but its ultimate goal would have been to turn and corrupt Force-wielders, like Talon, and to eliminate the nascent Jedi Order in the process.

In this sense the story would have explored the moral problems posed to a new generation of Jedi as they are confronted with the darker nature of the Force and tempted to use its power. This general idea of the sequels exploring the nature of good and evil has not only been mentioned in old interviews with Lucas or those close to him, it was also strongly suggested by the publishing material that came out around the time of TFA, namely the novelization with its opening poem from the Journal of Whills, and the visual dictionaries. But those feel to me like survivals of what would’ve been a more prominent theme in Lucas’s sequels.

Like I’ve said, this is my interpretation based on the published materials and interviews we have seen, as well as based on the concepts that are popping up and which, having looked at this other info for a while now, seem strangely familiar.

 

I wonder if we would have learned about Yoda’s species.

 

Curious to see how a lot of this stuff gets recycled later. Like obviously the Nihl might be based off the space pirates but what about the Dark Gods, are we gonna get expanded material saying Palpatine the Dark Gods in Ep 9 were working together or were keeping Palpatine spirit alive?

If their is one thing I know about Lucasfilm a concept never truly dies.

 

@Jid123Sheeve, my theory is that the sequel trilogy was devised with the general idea that there was a dark force acting behind everything: Ben's fall, Luke's exile, the rise of the First Order. Although making Palpatine be that darkness was a later development, JJ did say that TFA had set up that general idea, and I do believe that, mainly because of the interactions between Kylo and Vader's helmet and because of the mystery surrounding Snoke.

Who knows if that dark force would've originally been as abstract as it appeared in that one concept art piece, and who knows if the creatures from High Republic, who are apparently called "the Nameless," will themselves be related to the Force. Trevorrow's original scripts, after all, did not necessarily include any reference to a greater darkness, despite bringing in a new dark-sider to further Kylo's path toward darkness. Though to be fair, in that script Kylo himself was attempting to achieve godlike power.

I do think they ended up deciding on Palpatine partially to make the dark threat more concrete, especially after Snoke's death. But I also think it was Carrie's death that really changed whatever general plans they had. Without her presence, especially during climactic moments, they may have feared the final movie would feel too separate from the overall saga. And so making the threat a familiar and beloved character who is, truly, quite appropriate to represent the dark side would seem like a good way to try to compensate for that. That's just my theory, though.

 

It's a good theory.

Curious though that Duel of the Fates script don't really go for a dark force behind everything I mean Tor Valum kinda does that but he dies midway through and the script never says he was behind anything important.

 

@Sauron_18 Maybe it would be revealed that Plagueis survived in midichlorian form?

 

Maybe, though I don’t necessarily get the impression that Lucas cared especially for Plagueis. At least, not as much as fans do. But perhaps in a sense similar to how the Son in Mortis contained elements of multiple Sith Lords.

I do wonder what Lucas would have done for villains. Would he have tried to depict the dark side more directly? Maybe the whole thing with the Whills was him thinking about how to personify the Force on a more cosmic level, how to bring in gods into the equation.

I did recently read in a fuller version of the interview with James Cameron that, before selling the company, Lucas didn’t quite have an answer yet for how he was going to depict the Whills. He knew he wanted them to be single-celled organisms, the foundation of life and all ecosystems, and godlike in age and power over those ecosystems. But as to how he would depict them visually, that was something he was still exploring.

The articles written when the news about that interview came out took his statement about “going into” the microbial world too literally. I think some even compared it to Osmosis Jones. But that’s absolutely a parody of what he said.

My guess is the Whills would have remained invisible in the sense that there would have been no microscopic images of them and certainly no shrinking of the main characters. Perhaps as a mass they would have been visible, bright abstract colors like bacterial colonies on Earth. He did something similar with midi-chlorians in TCW.

But I also think that he might have explored projections of the Whills, actual godlike or archetypal images or manifestations that they would have used to communicate with mortal beings. Indeed, I’ve been wondering if that works for the Mortis family. But the fact that they wanted Anakin to become one of them makes me think they were mortal beings who, if anything, were only strongly associated with the Whills, possibly especially “infected” by them.

Even in Mortis you get the intriguing idea of the dark side being a sort of physical infection, with the Son infecting Ahsoka. So there are some seemingly biological elements there already, though who knows if Lucas had already started thinking about the Whills in that way yet...

Perhaps he had, since Plagueis was so closely associated with those ideas way back in 2005. Indeed, his very name touches on the idea of microbial life, so maybe there’s something to that notion.

 

So after now reading the released ideas Lucas had for his sequels, what do you think? This thread has many excellent post, if you havent read them, you should. And some pieces together the notes and developed what might have been with a "microbial world" communicating through both dark (Talon and Uber) and light (Kira, Luke and Sam).

 

Not sure if you've heard about the Star Wars Archives 1999-2005, but in the book the author interviewed George Lucas in 2019 and discussed his plans for the Sequels and it turns out Maul was suppose to be in control of the criminal underworld and Talon was like his apprentice. Seems you were right on this one.

Although the idea of Talon and Maul working together originally came from the cancelled Darth Maul game.

 

Lucas gave them that idea:

"A friendly George Lucas entered the room and was eager to hear the pitch from Red Fly’s creatives. “Before they could finish their spiel, Lucas cut them off, stood up, walked over to the statues, rotated them to be facing the same direction, pushed them together, and said ‘They’re friends!’” adds the source. “He wanted these characters to be friends, and to play off of each other. He talked about the show Burn Notice as a reference point. He likened Darth Maul to Sonny from The Godfather, and he likened Darth Talon to Lauren Bacall."

 

The microbiotic world Lucas mentioned was in reference to the Whills. The Whills would appear in the sequel trilogy.

Meanwhile, Lucas gave us a broad overview of what his sequel trilogy would be about in the prequel Archives book:

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Correct. In hindsight, it's interesting how that information might inform how he was going to approach both characters in the sequels.

 

Interesting how Maul forms an early connection with Ahsoka in season 7, maybe Ahsoka will become Darth Talon at some point:

 

The comparisons to noir also fit with what little we knew about the Underworld series concept. It's interesting how in a few lines we get a sense of the type of characters and dynamic we would have gotten for the villains. While we got a preview of Maul as a crime lord in The Clone Wars, but I'm especially intrigued by the interpretation of Talon as the classic femme fatale archetype from film noir. It's certainly rather different from how I saw her original character in the Legacy comics.

In thinking about Lucas's comments on how his movies would have featured the story of Leia trying to reestablish a true democracy for the Republic, free from the influence of the crime lords, I was reminded of the plot of Bloodline. So I read up on it some more and learned that at least some of the general story ideas for that book actually came from Michael Arndt's early drafts for Episode VII. Considering he was working on the script back when Lucas was still involved with the sequels, then, it's likely that's where some of these ideas came from. Of course, the final product is very different from what we would have gotten had this been explored in film by Lucas. But it does provide another glimpse into those sequels.

And one of those ideas, it seems, was the revelation of Leia's true parentage to the Senate. Apparently that storyline from the book comes from a planned animated short that was proposed back in 2012. So perhaps that's another aspect that would have played a role in the sequels, and it certainly fits with their being more focused on galactic politics.

 

There are a few intriguing bits here (and not necessarily in a good way).

-The mentions of the Iraq War, the Clone War cartoons.... make it clear that these ideas have nothing to do with what Lucas had in mind in the late 70s/early 80s for the ST. Instead, these are entirely new ideas that started forming after 2008.
-The fact that "it starts out a few years after ROTJ" seems problematic, because Harrison, Mark and Carrie were much older by then.
-It's remarkable that Lucas deliberately takes ideas and characters from the Clone War cartoons and comic books, because for a long time, he made a clear distinction between his six films and "everything else".

 

With Clone Wars he was personally involved in, especially the later seasons. It was also considered "T-Canon", one tier below "G-canon".

I think this story may of been set after the events of Dark Empire not just ROTJ. Which could explain many Sith Lords roaming around in early concept art for TFA. Lucas did consider the EU canon but lesser level canon, and liked the Dark Empire story, and he came up with the idea for a Clone of Palpatine. So its very likely that story occurred before the events of his ST. TFU was a sequel to ROTS and prequel to ANH, so even Shadow Guards were canon back then.

Maul is very important in the Lucas' universe(live action and animated), never mind the old EU or modern EU/Neo-Canon. He remains as such in the latest seasons of TCW and 2018's SOLO even with Lucas gone but not really gone. Probably the Kasdans tried to keep some of Lucas' ideas intact by putting Maul in SOLO since Lawrence was brought onboard to support Lucasso eventually connected Maul to a young Solo and Kira was renamed Qi'ra. Her junk planet became Correlia.

Ray Park made a comment that his make-up in SOLO was deliberately different and aged up, and served a purpose he could not get into.

We also know that Lucas was involved with not only that "Underworld" series which would've likely featured both Maul and Boba Fett but a young Han Solo spin off film before he sold the company:




So from what we can gather, his ST would've started right after ROTJ, and then aged up the grandchildren of the main characters, probably a faster version of what we got in TPM with Anakin. Probably a certain amount of de-aging would've been used, similar to Mandalorian, Rogue One and TROS for characters like Luke, Han and Leia. Lucas was also open to writing those characters off if any of the former cast did not want to return. So there was likely back up plans for them.

Luke also finds around 50-100 Jedi(not uncommon in the EU and modern EU/neo-Canon constantly uses surviving Jedi too) and Force sensitives.

Maul successfully survived the chaos of the Clone War and Order 66, he out lasted and undermined the Empire and Emperor for decades, he's like the anti-Galen Marek. He trains a young girl who becomes Darth Talon who grows up to be this powerhouse as she becomes the Vader of the trilogy, she eventually manipulates and converts Sam/Skylar( Lucas' version of Ben Solo). As the New Republic attempts to form at various stages, they have to deal with Maul's Criminal Empire (Shadow Collective/Crimson Dawn/5 syndicates)that has filled the power vacuum left by the Empire.

Along with that are rogue Imperial warlords(Gideon and/or Snoke? type) holding onto planets. A big traumatic event occurs at some point, Luke gets betrayed by one of his pupils. His new Jedi Order gets destroyed. Kira/Taryn/Winkie eventually finds the colonel Kurtz type aged Luke hiding in exile and he trains her to some extent before himself dying/killed.

Lucas chose to kill Luke in Episode VIII, that is documented so he would've died in the second film.

Lucas promised Ford that Han Solo would be killed off in order to get him back. So its very likely he would've died in the first film,lol.

Somewhere in this trilogy lies Lucas' infamous microbiotic world as some minor side subplot. There is some kinda confrontation with Lucas' version of the Whills who feed off of the Force and basically control the universe.

Felucia was pretty important in Lucas' version of the sequel trilogy in some capacity.

Evil Space Pirates and Bandits would've factored into the storyline in some capacity, possibly idea where they got the Nihil. Most likely controlled by Darth Maul and his criminal Empire. One art piece featured a Mandalorian style bandit with a red lightsaber.

There may of been more than one grandkid of Vader's since Lucas back in 2015 was wondering what happened to Vader's grandkids in the new movies. So it seems Leia had more than one child, and maybe Luke had a child but Lucas did not seem very fond of Mara Jade from what we know. So he may of remained celebrate like the PT Jedi or he may of had a child that ended up likea Mordred but there is little to go on. Daisy claimed that Rey at one point was supposed to be a Rey Kenobi, so its possible Lucas may of wanted Kira to be Kenobi's granddaughter or niece.


Its likely that Lucas had devised Imperial type Sith Lords(probably later turned into Filoni/Kinberg's Rebels Inquisitors) to be a part of his trilogy along with Maul and Talon as a separate group. We know Lucas envisioned Maul to destroy rival Sith Lords whom he viewed as an affront to the Order. Lucas was also open to the idea of Maul, or a clone of Maul or male descendant being alive a 100 years after the OT into the Legacy era.

One has to wonder if Lucas was gonna introduce more clones(TROS eventually did but hinted at doing in TFA) and time travel(Rebels did in its last season).

I do think his ST would've been backed up with comics, video games, novels and of course a new animated series.

 

How do you know they have nothing to do with his ideas in the 80s? It's not like they are mutually exclusive. We do know that he never had an actual story developed for the sequels. Only ideas.

The inspiration from the Iraq War was in regards to the aftermath of the fall of the Empire. Specifically what happened to the Imperial forces after being disbanded. It's not what the story was about, but the state of the galaxy.

It's true that he only started to conceive a story after being creatively inspired by working on TCW/Underworld, but that was known before he revealed these plans.

On the surface, that's true. But deaging technology was not an alien concept in the industry. In any case, we don't know what he means by "a few years".

And that distinction stands. Lucas is a visual guy, he always took visual ideas from art developed for other works, as long as it appealed to him. But visuals and ideas are not stories. You would not see the EUs Darth Talon. That doesn't exist to him. You would see someone that's visually inspired by that character but recreated in a different manner. Not unlike what he did with some characters in TCW.

That's perfectly depicted in the description of the meeting from that Red Fly's employee. Lucas was giving ideas from his own world and they were taking it from the perspective of the world developed for the EU, which obviously wouldn't make sense. Not just timeline wise but in everything.

 

What I bolded there is very much in line with Lucas' "point at something he thinks looks cool from the EU and then run wild with it in his own way" approach to things, which he did time and time again with characters in TCW; I know that TCW's Quinlan Vos upset a lot of people who were long time fans of his EU stories, and the TCW take on Mandalorians upset Karen Traviss so much by running counter to her books that she quit writing Star Wars novels entirely.

Perhaps even more than not getting to see the ST treatments in full, what will always pain me the most is that we never got to see Star Wars: Underworld. Lucas would have absolutely thrived there. Pulpy noir in a seedy, Imperial occupied Coruscant spearheaded by the Maker himself? God, please give it to me now. I have this gut feeling that, if Lucas had somehow managed to figure out a way to make the show look the way it needed to on the budget that he had to work with, he never would have sold the company. He missed the streaming service mark by a mere handful of years, and the "real time rendering" of visual effects in camera that he was attempting feels very much like a prototype, at least in intent, for what The Mandalorian is now doing with the "Volume," but despite all of his technical innovation, Lucas circa the early 2010s just couldn't crack it; the tech wasn't there, a basic cable channel could never have funded it, and Netflix was still a few years off from totally disrupting the television landscape.



We know that in some capacity Disney/Lucasfilm is currently mining elements of Underworld, too. The Church of the Force that is mentioned in The Force Awakens is a concept that Lucas was going to explore there. I think a long time ago on Twitter Pablo Hidalgo insinuated that Lucas might have been developing a young Han Solo arc for Underworld (though maybe I'm getting that mixed up with the article posted about with Kasdan talking about a pre-Disney sale Han Solo film concept). Saw Gerrera was developed as an Underworld character first and foremost, then put in The Clone Wars by Lucas and Filoni to set that up, and has now been used in Rogue One and Rebels. And given what we now know about Maul's Sequel Trilogy role, I wouldn't be shocked if his Crimson Dawn role (or something very similar) had been an aspect of Underworld as well.

 

He could (and did) crack it. What they are doing with the "volume" is exactly what he was planning to do with the Grady Ranch. The difference is that he had a much grand creative vision and ambition. Where the richest entertainment company in the world uses it for unimaginative barren landscapes over and over, Lucas would use it to go right into the middle of Coruscant, arguably one of the most complex environments in Star Wars.

Unfortunately he wasn't allowed to do it, which is what killed the Underworld project at the time.

 

He couldn't crack it budget wise, though. It wasn't possible to get the cost of the tech down to something that would be feasible to do on television. None of the networks would give him the funding to get it there, and he couldn't do it on his own, and that's why the show died. If Netflix had gotten into funding and developing their own original series a few years earlier than they did, maybe we might be looking at a very different Star Wars climate today than the one we are currently in...