Star and the Forces of Evil (partially found unaired pitch pilot; 2011)

A screenshot of the early title screen for the pilot, back when it used the original name for the series.

Status: Partially Found

Star vs. the Forces of Evil is an animated series on Disney Channel and Disney XD created by Daron Nefcy, former storyboard revisionist on Wander over Yonder, and the first woman to create an animated series for Disney since Sue Rose's Pepper Ann. The show follows Star Butterfly, a magical princess from the dimension of Mewni who, on her 14th birthday, receives the family heirloom magic wand. However, due to her extreme enthusiasm and extreme inexperience, she almost destroys the entire kingdom with it, and her parents decide that a safer option would be to send her to Earth to live with the Diaz family. There she befriends their son Marco (a safety-minded boy who is immediately a little freaked out at being assigned the new "foreign exchange student"), and after receiving a pair of dimension-cutting scissors (allowing them to travel through dimensions) from a free-spirited friend of her's, the two must deal with everyday school life while protecting her wand from falling into the hands of evil forces.

After Nefcy retooled her pitch for the series from having Star be a deranged but otherwise ordinary grade student who only believed she had magical powers to having her become a foreign exchange student from another dimension with a magical wand (after an executive suggested changing Star into a teenager with real magical powers), she alongside Canadian animation studio Mercury Filmworks created a test pilot in about one year (2011-2012) as a way of convincing Disney of green-lighting the show's production, with the series's first season taking about two more years to make (2012-2014). During this time, the show was originally called Star and the Forces of Evil. The pilot was then sent to Disney, but for unknown reasons, the pilot was significantly reworked, and after a preview of the show's intro was shown at the 2014 San Diego Comic-Con, the series's first episode premiered on Disney Channel on January 18, 2015, with the show officially starting on Disney XD on March 30, 2015. The series gained a large fanbase soon after a recording of the preview was uploaded to YouTube, and it quickly became one of Disney's highest rated current television series, to the point where the company renewed the show for a second season a month before it aired.

Other than the name change, not much else is known about the pilot as it never aired. However, a few shots from the pilot were captured from two Mercury Filmworks animation reel videos on Vimeo, showing scenes that were never used anytime during the first season (Star leaping off a plank of wood that soon hits Marco), and scenes that were later used during the show's second episode (Star and Marco preparing to face off against a pack of monsters, and Star hitting one monster on the head hard), showing that a significant amount of work was done to it before it was never aired.

As of late 2015, the series's first season ended, with no word as to if the unaired pilot will ever be released, or why it was never aired in the first place.

Differences

The pilot has the in-production name that the show had until it was changed to Star vs. the Forces of Evil.
The art style and designs, while very similar, has some differences from the final show.
- The eyes are different, being more circular and having larger pupils.
- Star's wand has a different design, like being pink and having a big heart instead of a star.
- Star wears kitty ears instead of devil horns at one point.
- Star's cheek hearts are outlined.
- When wearing his karate uniform, Marco has a black belt and wears a green belt as a headband.
- Marco wears blue jeans instead of dark-gray pants.
- Marco's hoodie is dark red instead of light red.
- Star's dress has longer sleeves and at one point is shown wearing a green dress.