Under Disney's leadership, Lucasfilm has arguably expanded the Star Wars brand significantly, producing a ton of TV shows over the past five years. But low-cost spin-offs made for the small screen have been a part of Star Wars for decades. Case in point: Ewoks: Battle for Endor just celebrated the 40th anniversary of its first airing on ABC. This means that it is now twice as old as the original. Star wars was during the 1997 special edition re-release. It's a reminder that sometimes sparse supporting material helps perpetuate a series in the years between splashy feature films.
It's also a reminder that no, George Lucas wasn't actually lying when he said called “Star Wars” the property of children. A pair of made-for-TV films about Ewoks that aired after 1983. Return of the Jedi make this especially clear. First, 1984 Caravan of Couragefollows siblings Sindel (Aubrey Miller) and Mace (Eric Walker) – their last name is Tovani, not Windu – as they search for their parents after the family starship crashes on the forest moon of Endor, the site of the climactic event. Return of the Jedi combat. During their quest, Sindel befriends Wicket (Warwick Davis), an Ewok who serves as the tribe's nicest ambassador, and even begins to learn some alien-style English words.
In the 1985s Battle for Endorthe entire Sindel family (including Mace!) is quickly and somewhat unceremoniously killed by a group of invading marauders, making this version of the Ewoks Alien 3. As Sindel and Wicket escape the carnage, they meet Tic, a fast-moving creature who is essentially an Ewok, meet the Looney Tunes Road Runner and Noah (Wilford Brimley), a cranky but ultimately kind recluse stranded on Endor. (These elements are somewhat less similar Alien 3.) The group band together to reclaim the starship's power cell, taken from Sindel's father by chief marauder Terak (Carel Struycken) and werewolf sorceress Charal (Sian Phillips), which Noah can use to repair his own crashed ship and return home.
Star Wars purists may get confused by the “sorceress-werewolf” thing, and Charal actually turns into a bird. But in his wretched, banal, childish manner, Battle for Endor really gets to the tug-of-war genre that animates Star Wars: is it a sci-fi franchise with its advanced robotics and interstellar travel, or is it a fantasy where the Force is pseudoscientific magic and the Jedi are space wizards? Even though the power cell is the MacGuffin from the movie, Terak and Charal don't really know what it does, other than the assumption that it must hold some kind of power over the stars. Meanwhile, Sindel seems unfazed by Charal's mysterious abilities, despite seemingly having no real context for anything like that.
In some ways, this story, conceived by Lucas and then given to siblings Ken and Jim Wheat to write and direct, examines the science-fiction/fantasy hybridization of Star Wars through the eyes of a child. After all, these are all different forms of magic, and the inclusion of a sorceress doesn't break canon so much as it expands on the strange mysteries of this vast universe, something that younger viewers have far less of a problem with than veteran fans. Children who really love Ewoks are unlikely to notice the fact that most Battle for Endor unfolds as a medieval-style fantasy adventure, with Return of the Jedi The forest encounter is rehashed at the end. (To be honest, seeing Ewoks holding blasters in this movie is almost as disturbing to adults as watching a woman turn into a bird.)
It doesn't mean Battle for Endor especially interesting for adults. But it illustrates how even a one-off TV movie can serve as a vehicle for expressing what Star Wars means to a specific audience. This is true even if that car continues to move around the parking lot. Before these films were decanonized into the Legends category along with the other Expanded Universe novels, games, etc., they couldn't even remain stable in the existing timeline. At first it was assumed that they would occur after Return of the Jedi; they were later repeated earlier to take place sometime before that.
It's also interesting to see what bits of film the nerdy filmmakers saved for future Star Wars projects. The blurggs, for example, the stubby, vaguely fish-like land creatures ridden by the marauders in the film, have been brought back into the live-action realm with The Mandalorian. These are truly wonderful creatures of unusual design.
Meanwhile, Charal's status as a witch in the Star Wars TV project is ahead of her time, given the presence Sisters of the Night V Clone Wars and related witches in Novicea show that inexplicably attracted some fans freak, damn it for many reasons, including this one some of his characters were witches. One of the most compelling aspects of Star Wars as a franchise is that various spin-offs have been relegated to trivial, fringe, or even actively de-canonized corners of the galaxy, and yet some characters, details, or ideas from those spin-offs manage to survive and reappear as part of some future project.
At its worst, this tendency represents a deep, alienating dependence on knowledge, which has led to the inventive (though now, like all shiny coins, terribly abused) term. Stupid Shitto. It can also be frustrating for Star Wars fans who are hungry for something truly new rather than constantly digging through the archives for inspiration. Both Ewok movies are labeled “Star Wars: Vintage” on Disney Plus, which makes them look suspiciously like line figures. It's a potentially depressing ending to the search for inspiration in old Star Wars media: a group of filmmakers rallying their action figures in public, perhaps while someone dictates ideas from Reddit.
At the same time, there's a certain audience-neutral faith in this repurposing that ties Star Wars to the vast, glorious mess of comic book continuity that can never be fully untangled, no matter how many #1 issues Marvel or DC put out. Familiar calls to erase this or that supposedly disastrous creative decision in Star Wars—like continuation of the trilogywhich some fans would like to simply sweep under the rug – seems to be a failure to truly understand what Star Wars is, instead wanting to refocus it on releasing one near-perfect feature film every three to five years. Some series definitely register as zombie franchises, revived, expanded, and annotated out of desperation. But marginal oddities such as Battle for Endor have been a part of Star Wars for most of its history.
That doesn't mean it stands on its own, and it definitely doesn't mean you necessarily like the Ewok TV movies. Star Wars Holiday Specialor any number of TV shows with lots of real-life issues. As for me, I'm still stunned by these clumsily written filler episodes at the center of an otherwise interesting series. The Obi Wan Kenobi Showor the pure corporate skittishness that seemed to motivate The Rise of Skywalkerand I have no long-term desire to watch Ewok movies in this life.
But I also don't understand any particular incentive to consider Star Wars “ruined,” whether by Lucas, Kathleen Kennedy, Disney in general, or anyone else. He must not have seemed like a particularly important cultural force in the 1980s, when George Lucas poured a fair amount of time and money into a couple of TV movies based on Ewoks. But some kids liked them, a lot of adults undoubtedly didn't, and eventually some bits later made their way back to more interesting works, either by accident, superficially, or because someone at current Lucasfilm considers the (other) Battle of Endor to be an absolutely important chapter in the lost history of Star Wars.
Star Wars' return to television should be a clear sign of how dispensable all this material really is, no matter what Disney's real hopes are that fans will lap it all up. But the real danger of endlessly expanding their Star Wars brand isn't that the brand's owners will make another clunky series or something stupid for kids; it's that they will be prevented from delving into the past or creating something new out of a defensive fear of maintaining the wrong image.
Ewoks: Battle for Endor streaming exclusively on Disney Plus. Nobody else wanted it.
