10 More Deleted Star Wars Moments You Won't Believe Nearly Happened

Though not the first of this species to hold a lightsaber as in the galaxy far, far away - Gungi has also been doing his thing in the animated Star Wars: The Clone Wars and The Bad Batch show over the years, for example - Kelnacca did become the first live-action Wookiee Jedi during the The Acolyte's first season... for a bit.

In the end, the towering Jedi Master was suddenly murdered by the Stranger during Episode 4 "Day". However, viewers never actually got to see the duel which led to Kelnacca's demise, with Mae simply finding the dead Wookiee with a lightsaber slash across his chest.

This wasn't actually the original plan, though. 

At one point, fans were actually going to see a full Kelnacca vs. the Stranger showdown on-screen. But according to one of the episode's writers, Claire Kiechel, on X (via Cinemablend), this early draft idea was ultimately sliced out of the series because it "broke the POV of the episode in a way that I think wouldn’t have worked as well."

Admittedly, having the Stranger show up and cross lightsabers with the mighty Wookiee here would have probably undermined his epic reveal from the perspective of Osha and the Jedi a little later on in the episode. 

But while we would at least see Kelnacca waving his lightsaber around in later episodes, you'd still be lying if you said you didn't want to see what a big, furry Jedi fighting a powerful masked dark side user looked like on your screen.

As Keichel noted, there was very much a time there when this on-screen fight was being considered.