Cassian Andor Series To Bring Back Little-Seen Or Unused 'Star Wars' Creatures

The future of movie theaters seems tenuous at the moment, but the prevailing wisdom right now seems to be that when the coronavirus crisis ends, (some) theaters will still be around, even if they're only used for mega-blockbuster comic book and Star Wars movies. While we wait to learn more about what will happen to the theater industry, let's turn our attention to Lucasfilm's future on the small screen – specifically, the Cassian Andor Disney+ series which acts as a prequel to Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. According to a new interview, this show will serve as a "second chance" for Star Wars creatures who may have only gotten a brief moment of screen time, or a place for previously-made but unused creatures to finally make their mark in a galaxy far, far away.

During the press rounds for the home video release of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, MovieWeb caught up with Neal Scanlan, the creature and special make-up effects creative supervisor of the five most recent Star Wars movies. Scanlan has been making lots of headlines recently by dropping interesting little tidbits about Star Wars productions, and when the interview turned toward the upcoming Cassian Andor Disney+ show, which features Diego Luna reprising his role from Rogue One as a Rebel spy, Scanlan revealed some more interesting info about the series. After talking about how working on a Star Wars show doesn't feel noticeably different from working on a Star Wars movie, he said:

"We also have this backlog of characters. A lot of the characters that we built for all of the films either didn't make it to the final cut, because that's just the way that the film process happens, or that they are seen so momentarily that there is this wonderful second opportunity to bring back some of the characters that we've made and bring them to this new storyline in a more, shall we say, integrated way. I think it's going to be tremendous. I find that it's a second opportunity for everything that we've made, plus the opportunity of moving TV along, in a sense, at what will not at all be diminished as far as the level of quality, the level of things that we are going to try and achieve."

Scanlan and his team devote tons of time and resources to the design and creation of Star Wars creatures, so it only makes sense that Disney and Lucasfilm would want to get their money's worth and make sure those creatures are utilized as efficiently as possible. The interesting thing to me, though, is that Star Wars fans are incredibly obsessive about the tiniest details, so it's guaranteed that fans will notice when a creature who appeared for a microsecond in the background of a shot suddenly pops up in a different context elsewhere in the galaxy. But will the people behind the scenes actually care about that degree of scrutiny? More importantly, will we see more of characters like Dexter Jettster and Sy Snootles? Those are the real stakes of what we're talking about here, folks.

The Cassian Andor series was supposed to begin production this year for a 2021 release on Disney+, but we'll have to wait and see if that still happens or if it's ultimately delayed.