But it's the opinion of the poster linked above that it was the Ewoks that did it. Again, fine by me; I don't hate the Ewoks, but most people do. (I like them and think they just weren't savage enough. Too comedic.) However, I wonder about this, which is become something of a shibboleth in Star Wars crit:
That's right, the moment Lucas decided to put merchandising above storytelling, the shark was well and truly jumped. Not only did we get cute, cuddly Ewok toys and the execrable Ewok adventure movie, we were also cheated out of seeing the Wookies kick some Empire butt during the fight to eliminate the shield generator.
Because Lucas saw $$$, the Wookies were relegated to a bit-part in Episode III, and the Ewoks took their glory, and we got the shaft. Episode VI could have been so much better without Ewoks, too bad Lucas was eying the killer fish in the water in front of him.
My question is simply this: is there any evidence at all for the belief that Lucas was going to have the Wookiees in Return of the Jedi until he got the idea of marketing Ewok teddy bears? Where on Earth did this come from, anyway? Everything I've read on the subject indicates that Lucas decided on Ewoks because he wanted a non-technological race to play a role in defeating the Empire in the final battle, and he'd already depicted the Wookiees as being quite technologically proficient. That makes sense from a story standpoint, so why do people believe that Lucas just made whatever he thought would sell the most toys? I genuinely don't understand this.
After all, it's not like he couldn't have simply made Wookiee toys in the same vein as the Ewok ones. There could have been Wookiee plush toys and Wookiee tree village playsets. Those two Ewok TV-movies? Sure, he could have made a Wookiee TV movie. In fact, he'd already done so, and maybe that was part of the problem, since when RotJ was on its way to theaters, that Holiday Special was a lot fresher on the brain for Star Wars fans.
Unless someone can point to an interview in which George Lucas specifically states something along the lines of "I thought Ewoks would sell better for Kenner", I see no reason to take this line of thought. It seems awfully cynical to me.
4 comments:
I've never bought the "marketing-came-first" thing either. You can argue whether the Ewoks work or not in artistic and/or narrative terms, but I'm willing to give Uncle George the benefit of the doubt when he says he thought Wookiees -- as exemplified by Chewie -- were too sophisticated for what he wanted to do in the story, so he had to invent another Wookiee-ish species. (I've always heard that Ewoks vs. stormtroopers originated with the George's thinking on the Vietnam War, i.e., a technologically sophisticated military being defeated by less sophisticated people who knew how to use the elements of their environment to their advantage.)
I think the Ewoks-as-toys idea is probably nothing more than a knne-jerk reaction against the marketing juggernaut that Star Wars became; the Ewoks, because they already resemble teddy bears design-wise, are easy to accuse of being designed to be nothing more than teddy bears. The same argument was made about Jar-Jar; I've heard a lot of folks say, "oh, he was just there so the kids would buy the dolls." Except... I don't think JJ was one of the more in-demand figures, based on what I saw hanging on the pegs when I was still haunting toy stores.
It's just sour grapes, IMO.
Oh, and for the record, I'm not wild about Ewoks -- I too think they were played too funny and too cutesy, a problem that haunts the scenes in Jabba's palace as well -- but I really don't have a problem with the little guys from Endor. The only thing that really bothers me about that whole sequence is, why do three-foot-high people who don't wear much in the way of clothing have a human-proportioned dress for Leia to change into? And why did she need to change anyhow? The guys had to stay in their "work clothes."
I'm not a Star Wars afficionado, so I'm happy to be corrected on any of what follows, but I heard somewhere that when Lucas was setting terms with the studio for the first Star Wars movie he made a point of retaining the rights to all spin-off merchandise--and remember that he did this at a time when spin-off geegaws were not nearly as big a deal as they are now. Apparently the studios were happy to sign those rights away.
If this is true, it suggests that the Star Wars movies have been about marketing, at least to some extent, from day one, not that the already enormously wealthy Lucas suddenly got interested in marketing Star Wars junk at some point later in the game.
If the quality of the movies has been compromised by merchandising, that compromise was written into the series' DNA from the beginning.
I like the Ewoks. I heard the stroy of depicting a Vietnam War like scenario as well.
As to the Prequels - This is how i know the prequels aren't the horsebleep everybody says they are. My four year old LOVES Attack of the Clones. He would rather watch that than anything else.
Those Ewoks are vicious little buggers. "No mercy" is what they showed the Stormtroopers, and at the end they're banging away musically on dead Stormtrooper helmets. Cute and cuddly...I don't believe it.
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