Star Wars: Live Action (sans Jedis)

So the casting call for the rumored live action Star Wars series is apparently underway.

Awesome.

Lucas says the show will be set between Episodes III and IV, focus on several minor characters from the saga and center around the small steps the Rebels take against the Empire. Sounds like all the fixings of a nice extended universe story, sans one thing -- THERE'S NO JEDIS.

Not awesome. (Unless, of course, you're Darth Maul then the whole "bye-bye Jedi" thing is totally cool, bro.)

Once again it sounds like Lucas will circumvent 90 percent of his audience and focus on munitia that most fans don't care about. This approach could work, hell, I hope it does work, but he's going to have to get some cracker jack writers in there to make the idea fly.

This is going to be Star Wars driven by characters -- not action -- and as much as I loved Episode III, some of the characters were so stiffly written I thought they were to fall over faster than an Ugnaught behind a farting Wookie.

At any rate, seems like the show is still pretty deep in the pre-production pipeline, so there's still hope ...