Lucas gave G4’s Attack of the Show an update on the status of the Live Action Star Wars series.
About a year ago, we heard that a Star Wars live-action series had begun shooting, but that it was being shelved temporarily. Since then, there has been little talk of it, and we’ve all been content to enjoy Clone Wars in the mean-time.
This week, George Lucas, the infamous Star Wars creator sat down with Kevin Pereira of Attack of the Show on G4 to talk about the new 3D Star Wars theatrical release (Tom Fitzgerald was there too, but Lucas didn’t let him talk).
Most of the interview was spent reassuring Kevin that the films will not suck, and that they’ve made advances in post-production 3D which will make it look just like it was filmed in 3D.
We’ve heard that from other studios, of course, and it’s never true. Post-production 3D simply isn’t very good (and maybe it’s psychosomatic, but it always gives me a headache, while natural 3D does not). Also, we got to hear a bit of Lucas’s 3D philosophy when he stated, “I’m not a big believer of poking things in your face.”
The interesting question came at the end, however, when Kevin asked him about the status of the Llive action Star Wars show. Lucas told him that they’ve got about 50 hours of footage in the can, but that when they reached that point they realized that the production costs were just too high.
He pointed out that to make television, one must work with about 1/10th of the budget one gets for film, and so they can’t produce more until they find a way to do it more cheaply.
This seems silly to me. I mean, I’d like to see a high-quality Star Wars series as much as the next geek, but honestly, if it’s well written, I would not care if they cut the effects down to make it fit within current television production standards.
The effects level of a Star Trek series is all we really need. Now, if they made a show with crappy effects and crappy stories, that would be disappointing, sure, but it’s the story of Star Wars that the fans really want more of, not the special effects.
