The Original Plans For The Obi-Wan Kenobi TV Series Were Wild

Whether you loved the Obi-Wan Kenobi TV series or it left you feeling disconnected from the Force of the Star Wars franchise, it’s interesting to think about the show we might have gotten. While we heard earlier this week that the show planned to kill off the villain Reva, and that the initial plan was to make a trilogy of Obi-Wan movies, now writer-producer Stuart Beattie has revealed some more of the earliest plans for the project, and they range from “Oh, cool!” to “You have got to be shitting me.” In another — and much lengthier — interview with the Direct, Beattie talked about his original plan for the story, and all the pretty major stuff that got cut along the way. First and foremost, Commander Cody — the orange-highlighted Stormtrooper who briefly appeared in Attack of the Clones and was a major character in the Clone Wars cartoon — was going to have a major role as Obi-Wan’s friend on Tatooine. As Beattie put it, “So you got these two kind of old warriors bickering like this old married couple, bitching about, ‘God, it was so much better when we had an army at our backs,’ you know?’” A specific scene that was lost when Cody was cut was one of him and Obi-Wan disposing of a group of bounty hunter corpses by dumping them in the Sarlacc pit: “My Cody was so fun. Cody was with Owen and there were some bounty hunters that had discovered Obi-Wan… And they gotta get rid of the bodies. And so there was just this really fun scene where, you know, what do you do with bodies on Tatooine and you need to get rid of them? Well, you go out to the local Sarlacc, right?” The scene was also supposed to include a mysterious speeder catching the duo in the act — but which turned out to be a completely wasted Jawa there to dispose of a corpse of his own. Another major scene that got cut was one of Obi-Wan having a vision after touching a sacred stone cherished by the refugees, who would have worshipped the Force as a goddess. The Jedi would open his eyes to discover he had been (seemingly) transported to Mustafar, and… “And he sees a guy in a dark robe with a red lightsaber, and he’s like, ‘Anakin, Anakin, Anakin!’ And as… the guy in the robe comes up, he lifts his lightsaber, you see, it’s Luke. Mark Hamill, 19. And so, Luke attacks him. Obi-Wan and Luke had this lightsaber battle in mine, which was mirroring, of course, Empire Strikes Back… so it was that kind of a thing that ends with, you know, Luke, just almost killing Obi-Wan, and Obi-Wan is snapping out of the, you know, the vision, basically, but it’s a vision of the future if Obi-Wan keeps training Luke and putting all his guilt on this kid, Luke’s gonna turn to the Dark Side.” And there’s so, so much more Beattie reveals in the interview, which is absolutely worth a read if you want to know the many other elements that might have been, for better or for worse. I will say this: it would be pretty rad for Temuera Morrison to show up if Obi-Wan Kenobi gets a second season. However, if it comes down to a choice between Cody and a drunken Jawa, I’m picking Drunk Jawa every time.

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