Star Wars: Fascinating Facts excerpt teases scrapped Imperial city in original trilogy

Some new facts are being teased from Star Wars: Fascinating Facts, including one about a scrapped Imperial city. 

Yet another Star Wars book is on the horizon next week. And up next is the title Star Wars: Fascinating Facts, a fact book written by Pablo Hidalgo that’s filled with all kinds of little-known Star Wars info.

Ahead of the book being released on Oct. 13, Hidalgo spoke to SyFy, where he revealed what it was like putting the book together. And, with that, they were able to share three excerpts from the upcoming book.

The most fascinating of these excerpts that’ll be in the book is the fact that there was an Imperial city and planet that was planned to be a location in Episode VI — Return of the Jedi. The planet was to be named Had Abbadon, and one of its cities would have been the location of the Emperor’s throne room. In the book (and on the excerpt from SyFy), the page is accompanied by two drawings that illustrated the concept of the Emperor’s regal room. Here’s what the full excerpt from the book says:

"Some of the earliest concepts for Return of the Jedi set the story on the city-covered Imperial planet of Had Abbadon. The Emperor’s throne room could be found deep beneath the multi-layered city, closer to the planet’s lava-streaked surface. These concepts would later inform the creation of Coruscant, the city-planet featured in the prequels. Before Had Abbadon was written out of the story, it was orbited by a “sanctuary moon,” a forest moon deliberately kept clear of construction so as to remain lush and pristine. This would become the Moon of Endor."

It’s interesting to see from that idea, just how much ended up staying around. Of course, yes, the Star Wars city would eventually get a proper metropolitan-like city in the form of Coruscant. We were also lucky enough to see the planet of Endor come to fruition, but there’s no doubt that it would have been interesting to see how George Lucas and co. would create a city pre-CGI days. (Or would he go back and have the city be completely CGI in his remasters?)

The other curious thing about this passage is that it mentions a lava-streaked planet, which sounds to us like Mustafar — the location of Darth Vader’s castle. While they don’t necessarily indicate that this was also the inspiration for the prequels location, we can’t help but wonder if there really is a connection between this scrapped idea and the formation of the Mustafar.

Additionally, in the article from SyFy, there are two more facts that they shared. The second fact was about the use of stop-motion animation in the original series. And the third fact explained some of the movie magic behind Rey and Kylo Ren’s scenes in The Last Jedi.

If those facts and more fascinated you, then you can check out Star Wars: Fascinating Facts when it comes out on Oct. 13.