The Most Hated Star Wars Planet Was Written To Be So Much Cooler

By Chris Snellgrove
| Updated 34 seconds ago

Most Star Wars fans agree that Endor is the lamest planet (Yes, technically a moon, stop typing that comment!) in the entire galaxy far, far away. Visually, it’s no more exciting than any given forest, and to make matters worse, it’s crawling with annoying little Ewoks. However, what most Star Wars fans don’t realize is that Endor was written to be much, much cooler: in the earliest drafts of Return of the Jedi, it orbited the planet that would later become Coruscant.

Earlier drafts of Return of the Jedi were very different from the final movie: for example, the Empire had two different Death Stars that were in orbit around a humble moon. The script identified this as a “Green Moon,” one that went by the goofy name of Jus-Endor before it was changed to (ahem) just Endor. In the finished Return of the Jedi, there is nothing remarkable about the planet that this forest moon orbits; it’s a rather boring gas giant that never has any real impact on the canon.

Endor Oribited Had Abaddon

However, in the rough draft script for Return of the Jedi, the forest moon orbited a planet called Had Abaddon. Up to this point in Star Wars, all of the planets that we had seen were defined by singular themes: Tatooine was a desert planet, Hoth was an ice planet, and so on. What made Had Abbadon special was that it was a city planet whose entire surface was one big, sprawling metropolis.

This wasn’t just any city planet, though: it was the home of the Empire. That early Return of the Jedi script located the Imperial Palace on Had Abbadon, and this was where Emperor Palpatine sat in his throne room. Originally, Luke Skywalker was going to have to confront Palpatine on this planet; also, the throne room was surrounded by lava (no, really!), and Luke was going to have to duel Darth Vader in an environment so fiery it gave Mustafar a run for its money.

So, what happened to this cool concept? In later drafts of Return of the Jedi, Palpatine’s throne room was moved aboard the second Death Star. This made the presence of an Imperial city planet feel a bit superfluous to the plot, so Had Abbadon was written out of the movie altogether.

Timothy Zahn Invented Coruscant

However, later Star Wars creators really fell in love with the idea of the Empire ruling the galaxy from the comfort of a sprawling, city-covered planet. One of those creators was Timothy Zahn, whose groundbreaking novel Heir to the Empire introduced fan-favorite characters like Grand Admiral Thrawn and Mara Jade. In his books, he wrote about the Rebels establishing the seat of the New Republic in the Imperial Center of this planet; however, disliking the name Had Abbadon (it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue), he named this planet Coruscant.

This was during the height of the Star Wars Expanded Universe, so Zahn’s name stuck around: countless other writers included Coruscant (complete with its new name) in their books. Interestingly, the first time we ever saw this planet onscreen was during cutscenes for the seminal 1994 video game, TIE Fighter. Just like that, a revolutionary flight sim brought to life the planet that George Lucas came so close to showing us in 1983’s Return of the Jedi.

Coruscant Finally Appears On The Big Screen

Things came full circle in 1999, when George Lucas put Coruscant (once again imagined as a city planet) in The Phantom Menace. As for Had Abbadon, it was briefly revived in the Star Wars EU as a separate planet, one that served as a source of power for Darth Krayt in the popular Star Wars: Legacy comics. However, this comic was decanonized after Disney purchased Star Wars, and in the current canon, “Had Abaddon” is merely the name of a mysterious, unknown system in the Deep Core.

As for the Forest Moon of Endor, it remained pretty unexciting in almost all of the drafts of Return of the Jedi; after all, there’s only so much you can do to make teddy bears and redwood trees seem very interesting. Once upon a time, though, this moon happened to orbit the seat of power for an Empire that ruled the entire galaxy, one with a throne room filled with lava. Honestly, it doesn’t get much cooler (er, hotter?) than that, and anyone who says otherwise is a laser-brained nerf herder.