Rick McCallum recently spoke about his work on the upcoming (though severely delayed) Star Wars series to Tosche Station. The good news: there is in fact giong to be an all-new Star Wars television series.  The bad news: it's going to have to wait a while.  McCallum of course helped George Lucas produce "The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles," the "Star Wars" prequels, and the special editions of the original trilogy.  (However, we don't hold those things against him.)

"[T]he Star Wars television series will be used as a blueprint for how we’re going to do our own films, the more personal movies George wants to make, how we’re going to use technology to make a movie for 10 or 15 million dollars with a lot of effects in it," said McCallum.  "Nowadays movies cost a lot of money and it doesn’t work. Movies are too expensive. It’s about how to change the perimeters of how do you set up the movie, how do you shoot it around the world, how do you make it look big in a more reasonable way. Most people forget that it takes three and a half, four years to make a Star Wars film. It’s long and that is why we are so excited to make the TV series because it’s much more character driven, you make a mistake one week and fix it the next week. You got this extraordinary story of twenty years between Episode III and IV while Luke is growing up that needs to be explored. So, we are looking forward to it. One of the things we are also looking forward to is finding a new group of talent to work with on feature films very much the same way as we did with Young Indy. Almost everyone that worked on Young Indy stayed with us for seventeen years or longer and some are still with us. Now we’re gonna start off with a new group, the next generation of filmmakers."

He continued: "I can’t tell you anything about actors because we’re not there yet. This is a long process to get it right. First of all: where are we going to shoot? Then: who’s going to write? And finally: who’s going to direct? George has been working for the last seven, eight months on the story arc line of where the series goes. The dream is to do way over one hundred hours of it. If we can get it right, we have some fantastic characters that nobody has ever met before and start a whole other world of Star Wars that comes out every week instead of every three years... The TV world is changing a lot. Hopefully we will have finished the first episode by the end of 2008, so that in 2009 it can come out."

Hey, at least it's not Ewoks or droids this time.