adywan said:
imperialscum said:
generalfrevious said:
The Ewoks only existed to sell toys. Everyone knows this.
That's a dumb statement. The furry creatures were part of the story from the beginning. They changed it from Wookiees to Ewoks because it is harder to get lots of 2.20m actors then lots of short ones.
completely wrong there. It was originally wookiees in Georges treatment but the reason he didn't use Wookiees had nothing to do with finding actors ( i don't know where you get that information from because i have never seen that reasoning anywhere). It's been pretty well documented that it was because he had already introduced Chewie as a character that can fly a spaceship and have intelligence and that Wookiees could no longer be the "primitive" race to defeat the Empire that George wanted. Early on in the writing of "Revenge", Endor was going to be populated with a race of Yuzzums (which the yuzzum ended up in Jabba's palace and then as a singer in the SE's). Ewoks weren't even part of the of the story until later on. Even Gary Kurtz said that he became disillusioned with George after ESB when he noticed that his priorities had changed from Story and character and focused more on selling toys.
When you see the early designs for the Ewoks you can see in their final design that their sole purpose was to look cute and look similar to Teddy bears to sell toys. Nothing more. The only reason we got the headdresses was because the costumes were too hot and they had to cut a hole in the back of the head for ventilation so they had to add the headdresses to hide this. Otherwise there would have looked almost identical to the childs toy.
So Not a dumb statement at all.
It's further evidence of Lucas' strange thinking about race.
A member of an isolated South American tribe may never have seen an airplane before but eventually be trained to fly one.
We see the Ewoks help Chewie drive an AT-ST and figure out laser rifles and speeder bike controls so how is that different from Chewie co-piloting the Falcon?
The main reason Lucas' went for the design was play against their look.
They look cute and small and yet they beat the Empire which is a great idea in principle but the way it plays out in the film as it was released doesn't work.
They need to be turned into tribal warrior people (who just happen to be small and furry) instead of comedy teddy bears who wave spears about and smack themselves in the head.