Help needed! Kenner DROIDS and Ewok Battle Wagon commercials

It came to my attention recently that a once-live web page on on StarWars.com had posted two Kenner commercials in apparent good quality back in 2010. Unfortunately, because StarWars.com revamped the whole site around 2012 and threw out pretty much everything from the old site, the content is long gone. It can’t even be accessed through the WayBack machine at Internet Archive (the page is there but the commercials are not!), though here is the link so you can see what I’m talking about:

https://web.archive.org/web/20110617035821/http://www.starwars.com/vault/collecting/droids_ewoks_25th_anniversary/index.html

There were two commercials on the page: one for the DROIDS line, and one for the Power Of The Force/Ewoks Ewok Battle Wagon. The DROIDS commercial I have in low quality with RetroJunk watermark, and that’s the only copy that’s ever surfaced to my knowledge. I never even knew about the Ewok Battle Wagon commercial, and it has not shown up anywhere else. They really need a preservation.

Did anyone manage to save these two commercials before they disappeared into the ether?

–SKot

I wish I had them mate - love watching the old commercials for old Star Wars toys and the like.

This Droids & Ewoks site http://droidsandewoks.weebly.com may be of some help and worth asking the people who run it. They seem pretty knowledgeable and good people - perhaps they know of someone who may have them?

It maybe worth reaching out to the people who wrote the old article on the official site - Pete Vilmur, Gus Lopez, Duncan Jenkins - see if they are on social media, and are contactable?

I think Pete Vilmur is still at Lucasfilm - it maybe worth asking them to include the videos again on any future Ewoks and Droids articles and content up on the official site or social media pages?
 

Good luck with it SKot - hope you find them. 👍
 

oojason said:

I wish I had them mate - love watching the old commercials for old Star Wars toys and the like.

This Droids & Ewoks site http://droidsandewoks.weebly.com may be of some help and worth asking the people who run it. They seem pretty knowledgeable and good people - perhaps they know of someone who may have them?

That’s a possibility, if I could reach them. Love that site, but unfortunately it seems to suffer from what nearly every modern site suffers from: no way to contact the owner(s)! I really miss the old days when people actually contacted each other through websites and shared information.

It maybe worth reaching out to the people who wrote the old article on the official site - Pete Vilmur, Gus Lopez, Duncan Jenkins - see if they are on social media, and are contactable?

I think Pete Vilmur is still at Lucasfilm - it maybe worth asking them to include the videos again on any future Ewoks and Droids articles and content up on the official site or social media pages?
 

Good luck with it SKot - hope you find them. 👍
 

Thanks! I’ve been in touch with Pete about it, and unfortunately he thinks the material on the old server was probably never saved/archived.

–SKot

Darth telly said:

You know what I think we need to do, list everything out that was once on starwars.com and search for it all because there should be a record of this stuff.

We lost a vast treasure trove of resources and material there when the plug was pulled on that stuff. What’s worse is that it sounds like starwars.com lost it as well, or at least no longer has any kind of access to it.

You know, the modern version of Fahrenheit 451 is not books being burned anymore - instead, it’s vast amounts of information, stories, and knowledge being destroyed when it all got deleted due to uncaring corporate bureaucracy.

–SKot

pufnstuf said:
Any luck finding this Skot? I distinctly recall seeing these on the sight and I was fairly good about trying to save off any multimedia content, but I’ve been unable to find these in my stuff I saved off. I’ll keep looking for it through. Forgot how much good stuff they used to have out there.

No, unfortunately nothing has changed on that since my original post. I still have my WMV file of the DROIDS collection commercial as shared by RetroJunk long ago in pretty low quality. But I’ve still never been able to dig up the Ewok Battle Wagon commercial, or the DROIDS commercial in any better quality.

I think the short period where those commercials were hosted was the period when it was very difficult to save videos from that site due to the formatting used. I believe they may have been in a secure Adobe Flash video format.

–SKot