Star Wars has never had a shortage of content in the Disney era, but it has arguably had a shortage of finished projects that actually get released. The franchise’s development history is littered with titles that were announced and then quietly buried, from Patty Jenkins’ Rogue Squadron to whatever became of Rian Johnson’s trilogy. So it’s a little ironic that while Lucasfilm struggles to get new films across the finish line, one of the oldest items in the vault is finally surfacing. Star Wars: Detours, the animated comedy series that has been sitting completed and unreleased for well over a decade, is going to be shown to the public at last. The catch is that you’ll need to buy a museum ticket to see it. During the “Inside the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art” panel at San Diego Comic-Con, it was confirmed that a selection of Detours episodes will be viewable at the Lucas Museum when it opens in Los Angeles on Sept. 22, according to Entertainment Weekly. Seth Green, who co-created the show, broke the news himself. “We made a show with George, an animated series,” Green told the audience. “He wanted to make Simpsons in the Star Wars universe. It’s called Detours, and there’s… going to be a curation of episodes from that show on display for the public.” Detours was announced in 2012 as a collaboration between George Lucas and the Robot Chicken team of Green and Matthew Senreich, whose Star Wars parody specials had already proven that Lucas had a sense of humor about his own creation. The series was set between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope and focused on the everyday absurdities of life in the galaxy rather than any grand mythology. Roughly 39 episodes were reportedly finished, with dozens more scripted.

Walt Disney Company

Then Disney bought Lucasfilm in October 2012 for about $4 billion, and the company’s priorities shifted overnight. The focus was now on relaunching Star Wars at a blockbuster scale, starting with a new sequel trilogy and Episode VII in 2015. In that context, a broad animated comedy like Detours suddenly looked a lot less essential. Lucasfilm’s official reasoning at the time was that Detours had been developed before the sequel trilogy was in motion, and that it no longer made sense to introduce a new generation of fans to Star Wars with a comedy ahead of Episode VII. It reads a little strangely now, given that the franchise would later make room for everything from LEGO specials to Star Wars: Visions. Green himself had more or less made peace with it staying buried. Speaking to ComicBook back in March, he said, “Detours itself would have to be edited, upgraded – they’d have to do new work on it to make it possible to put it on streaming.”
“I just don’t think they’re willing to commit the spend to update and release this when they can’t see a clear benefit.”

Lucasfilm Animation

That makes the museum arrangement feel like a clever workaround. A curated exhibition doesn’t require the remastering and quality bar a Disney+ release would, and it neatly sidesteps whether the show fits the current brand at all. Museum-exclusive footage has worked elsewhere, most notably at Studio Ghibli’s Ghibli Park, which screens short films that can’t be seen anywhere else and treats them as a genuine draw. Lucas has never been shy about his admiration for Japanese filmmaking, so using a lost Star Wars show as an anchor attraction for his passion project museum makes sense.

Whether it’s fair to fans outside Los Angeles is another matter. If the museum screenings generate buzz, the pressure for a wider release only grows from here. Whatever happens next, Green sounds genuinely happy that the show is getting any daylight at all. “It was the greatest,” he said at the panel. “It was literally one of the greatest experiences I think I’ve ever had.”