The Ewoks are an early example of the awkward racial profiling by proxy we would get in the prequels.
George’s main talent is evoking nostalgia.The problem being that those serials he was trying to evoke depicted some pretty awful racial stereotypes. The cowardly ‘Jap’, the noble savage, the money obsessed hooked nose Jew, the lazy black, the cannibal native.
The Tusken may fill the role of the Native American in a Western but he has the virtue of not having any of the physical tropes (no feathers, no war paint, no war song, no throwing axes, he gets a wigwam in the prequels but more of that later) so they work.
The Ewoks are beginning to be a bit too close to the hero eating natives of Tarzan to be comfortable. There is a serious debate going on now about the problems perceived by Slave Girl Leia and fat sultan Jabba but the Ewoks are more of a indicator of things to come for me than that.
In the PT we have the robot loving sneak attack slit-eyed Trade Federation, the money obsessed hooked nosed trader and Stepin Fetchit.
I don’t think George is trying to be offensive, his friends and family would hopefully not hang around such a man who would but I think he just doesn’t think like other people do and he increasingly distanced himself from people who might have steered him into more sophisticated ways of doing what he wanted.
I’ve always found it strange that more isn’t made about his offensive hardly-veiled racial stereotypes. I don’t know about his last two films, but Phantom is loaded with them. At times, it borders on SNL parody. Not in a funny way. JarJar is just plain insulting. He’s also a great indicator of just how out of touch Lucas really is.