Now that all six live-action Star Wars films have been filed away in the vaults of history, George Lucas is setting his sights on the small screen. That is, after the release of the animated feature film Star Wars: The Clone Wars, which will then find its way to TV as a stand alone series after it hits theaters on Friday, August 15. What does the future hold for the Star Wars universe?

Leading up to the release of The Clone Wars, George Lucas invited the press to tour his Big Rock and Presidio facilities in San Francisco, including his new animation studio, where journalists were able to get the straight story on everything from the future of his animation studio beyond Star Wars and the status of the live-action TV series to his foray into digital theaters, eventually seeing all six live-action films in digital, and why TV affords him more opportunities to expand the Star Wars universe.

Here are some of the highlights from the recent press tour to the Lucas empire.

George Lucas on Lucas Animation Film Ranch and other possibilities beyond Star Wars:

"Well, I guess we are an animation studio. We think of us as a little animation group. But we are - the feature is going to be an animated TV series, and hopefully it will go on for at least 100 episodes, probably more. We’re gong to probably do a younger version of Star Wars, which is more of a comedy, for small children, show, at some point. And we’ve been working towards possibly having the animation studio do a feature, but that’s somewhere in the future. But that won’t be Star Wars.

"This one came by accident, this feature. It really had to do with doing a TV series and developing new techniques, new studios and new technology. And when the first few shots came off the assembly line, I looked at it on the big screen, here, in the - we have a bigger theater. And I said, 'This is fantastic.' This is so much better than we thought it was going to be. This looks like a feature film. This could be a feature film. Why don’t we make a feature film?

"So I said, 'Why don’t we make a feature and introduce Asoka as a character?' Because I guess she was just a regular on the TV series. And so that’s how this happened, primarily because I thought, 'Gosh, it looks so great, a lot of the fans would probably like to see this on a big screen rather than on a small screen.' But - you know, it wasn’t really designed to be a feature film. I mean this was designed to be a feature film, but the inspiration for it wasn’t, say, 'Well, let’s make a feature film of Star Wars.' It was, 'Let’s do a TV series.' But eventually we may do one that’s actually a non-Star Wars thing, which is designed to be a feature film. But that’s somewhere in the future. I’m getting everybody to sort of work toward that. Right now we’re just a little TV animation studio [laughs]."

Lucas on the status of the live action Star Wars TV series:

"That is going ahead. We’re in the process of writing screenplays right now. It’s going to take a while. It’s just really hard to do. We’ve been working on it for about a year. And when we get enough screenplays and get all the technology worked out and all that sort of stuff - we’ve got a couple of Australian writers, a couple of British writers and we’re looking to shoot it in Australia. We’re not quite sure yet until we get a little bit further along in the process."

The live action storyline:

"It has nothing to do with the Skywalker saga. None of the Skywalkers or anything - this is what I call a little footnote to the Skywalker saga, which is - I couldn’t do it because in the features, because The Clone Wars don’t really have anything to do with Anakin. I mean, they’re bigger than that. And he becomes friends with Obi-Won, and that’s like - that’s not enough to make a movie out of. But it is enough to make a TV series out of. So, this is a footnote. The other series is just a complete offshoot. It takes place between Episodes 3 and 4, but it’s about sort of the lower levels of life, the lower depths of people that don’t - they hear about the fact that it’s no longer a Republic, that now it’s an Empire, but they’re not, you know, they’re in a world where none of that really means too much to them."

Lucas on being influenced by anime and manga and the special design of The Clone Wars:

"Well, this one... I’m not a big fan of realistic animation. If you’re going to make a realistic movie, you might as well use actors and shoot it. It’s much easier and cheaper and better, animation. The whole charm and wonder of animation is that you can stylize it. It’s an art form. You can actually create stylized versions of things. And I’m a big fan of anime and I’m a big fan of manga. I’ve always wanted to do something in my early, early career. I loved art and I wanted to be an illustrator. I was a big fan of illustration. So - and I’ve worked on a lot of animation. I started in animation in college. So, there’s that aspect of the whole thing that I did.

"With Star Wars, I based it on the Republic serials of the 1930s and 1940’s, which is a very particular style of movie-making which has a lot of cliffhangers and a lot of action and things. On this one I decided that I would go back to the 50’s and 60’s, and one of the shows I watched a lot was Jerry Anderson’s Thunderbirds. That’s a British TV series. It was done with marionettes. As I said, why don’t we make this thing look like it was done with marionettes, where you can see the paint on their faces and you can - it’s got a very painterly look. It’s not at all realistic. It’s something you could only do in animation, and so that’s how we came with the look. And then the style was-- you know, it’s not hardcore anime. It’s a soft anime, but very "design-y". You know, I like to do "design-y" kind of stuff. So that was fun."

Replacing the opening credit (crawl) with narration and accompanying visuals:

"Well, it’s very practical. In a movie theatre, the letters are THAT big. On a TV screen, they’re that big. And so it doesn’t lend itself towards titles. Usually the audience is younger. You know, Star Wars is like, 12-years-old. This show is more - a little bit younger than that, 10-years-old, still 12-years-old. But it skews younger where the other Star Wars sort of skews into teenagers. So we just felt it was better to do it. It has to be done very fast because we only have 22-minutes."

Lucas whether he ever imagined Star Wars would be so successful:

"When I made the original Star Wars, as I say, it was one movie. I wrote a back story to it. I wrote the script. It came out to 200 and some odd pages. I said, 'Well, I can’t do this, because they gave me $3 million.' No way that could happen. So I took each act and I cut it up. It was a way of saying, 'I’ll just put those on the shelf, but I will do them, in order to get through the whole thing, because I’d put all this work into it.' And then I started writing Star Wars.

"My assumption was it was going to fail because at this point in my career I’d done THX, which had failed, American Graffiti, which they wouldn’t even release, they felt it was so bad, and I was doing this crazy wacky thing that a studio executive says, 'I don’t understand what you’re doing. I don’t understand the story. I don’t get seven foot dogs and robots talking, it doesn’t make any sense to me. But I like you and I think you’re very talented and I think, you know, you’re going to go some place.' So I figured, 'Well, hey, I’ve got a shot. I’ll do this. And then somehow, by hook or by crook, I will get these other two made. But it’s going to be a struggle to convince people to spend more money on something that didn’t make any money.' So, when it was a hit, I was the most surprised of anybody."

His foray into digital theaters:

"I’ve been a big proponent of digital technology in cinema and promoting digital theaters. And in 1999, we did the first screening of a feature film in digital. And I’ve been trying to get the theaters to go to digital ever since. And one of the ways to do it we discovered a few years ago was to link it to 3D, because you can’t do the new really high tech 3D without doing it with a digital theater. And the theater owners sort of understood that and said, 'Oh this is great.'

"The fact that the quality is better didn’t really impress them that much. So we had done some experiments with a company to take the old Star Wars films and make them into 3D. That worked, except it wasn’t very practical. It was unbelievably expensive and took a huge amount of time. So we’ve been working ever since on developing technology and improving the technology so that we can do it for a reasonable amount of money and do it in a reasonable amount of time, because we don’t want to start until we can do all six of them. They won’t be all released at once, but once we start, we want to be able to make sure that all six get released. That will happen."

On whether TV is more exciting than film:

"It’s a much more exciting medium to me, because you can do so much more in it. A feature takes a long time, a huge amount of resources and it has a very, very narrow focus. Doing Anakin Skywalker’s descent into the dark side and redemption by his son is a very narrow story. You know, I created a universe that’s very, very big. But I still had to keep focused on a very narrow part of it. And that’s part of the excitement... there’s a funny character over here. I can’t tell his story. I can’t even do any... I mean, he appears on the screen for 8 seconds and that’s the end of it.

"There’s always this temptation to say, 'Well, that’s interesting, I want to explore that and see what it is.' So television gives me a chance to do that. I can go to Jabba the Hutt’s family and deal with his kid. I could never do that when I was dealing with all of Anakin’s anxiety about his mother and everything. It just didn’t fit. So, in this, especially in animation, I can. It’s a little bit more light-hearted, it’s more fun. I can take little side trips wherever I want to and say, "This week we’re going to deal with this over here." You know, it’s more interesting. I can do more things in it."

Science versus fantasy and how he connects the two:

"Well, obviously I’m always very aware of science, but I ignore science in Star Wars. We look at it as a different dimension, which is when people say, 'Well, I don’t get it.' I say, 'Well, it’s a different dimension. The laws of physics are different here, which may someday be true.' So, then... you know, Star Wars is not science fiction at all. It’s space opera, and it was meant to be space opera. And it’s much more attuned to mythology, to psychology, to history, than it is to science. You know, it’s more of a parable about the way we are than it is about the way we’re going to be. That’s why it starts out as a fairly tale. You know, 'A long time ago in a galaxy far away.' That’s, 'Once upon a time...' It deals with princesses and, you know. It’s purposely designed not to be about where we’re going. It’s about where we’ve been and what we can learn from the past in the present."

George Lucas and the difference between his animation studio and other animation studios:

"Well, we’re - next to other animation studios, we’re very, very small and we’re very economical. And we don’t have a lot of the giant resources that a lot of the other people have. We try to be very inventive and again, we’re here to really kind of have some fun. We don’t have a business plan where we depend on it to make money for us or anything. We’re just having-- basically, it’s a creative exercise where we get to, again, play in the Star Wars universe that’s been created, and explore things that have never been explored before. But, you know, eventually, because I like animation, we’ll probably do other things."