What's wrong with Ewoks?

I was seven years old when ROTJ came out and I loved the Ewoks, but I believe that they were marketed for children, even with Caravan of Courage and The Battle for Endor films. Getting older you find other things are much more cooler than the Ewoks. I know originally they were supposed to be Wookiees, but finding hundreds of seven foot extras and even a location with large enough trees that the Wookies lived in would have been too costly back in the early 80's.

 

They embarrassed a legion of the emperor's best troops.

 

Ewoks are ruthless killers! Show them a gun and you can expect a stone slingshot to the knackers followed by a falling tree to the head! Then they will cook you in a pot. What's not to like about them. They managed to capture a Jedi, captain, wookie, princess and two droids with only a dead animal and one net!

Looking back yeah they were aimed at us kids, but they had another side kids did not notice. I will be watching rotj in a new light from now on.

 

Sabalan, you asked a fair question and you did it very respectfully. Nobody should give you any negative votes for this. Let me try to give an answer that's as fair and as respectful as your question deserves.

A person's strength is measured in proportion to the challenge they overcome. The tougher the opponent, the more glory in winning the fight.

In the opening scene of A New Hope there are about a dozen rebels defending a corridor in Leah's ship. Those rebels are armed and in position to launch an ambush. Their blasters are aimed at the exact spot in the door where the strormtroopers will enter. The door blasts open and the stormtroopers attack. Even though there are only about half as many troopers as rebels, they rout the rebels and take control of Leah's ship.

Stormtroopers are tough. Fearless. Disciplined. And when I saw them in the theater for the first time, stormtroopers were a little frightening, too.

Now let's meet the Ewoks. They're terrified of Leah's helmet. They can be bribed with candy bars. They knock themselves out with stones tied to rope. They think Threepio is a god. They're short, fat, cute, and less threatening than any other alien species we see in the entire Star Wars saga.

The same stormtroopers who seemed so impressive in the opening scene of A New Hope get spanked by Ewoks.

Why do we hate Ewoks? Because they turned the formerly respectable stormtroopers into a bunch of idiot clowns in white armor. So when we see stormtroopers we're preprogrammed for a slapstick circus of mishaps.

Remember what I said about a person's strength being measured in proportion to the challenge they overcome? See what this does to the heroes of the Star Wars saga? Their achievements don't seem so impressive if all they did was escape a bunch of stormtroopers. Because when one Ewok is worth a dozen stormtroopers then where was the challenge?

It's not the cuteness and cuddliness we hate, it's that they took away the impressive presence from the stormtroopers, and in doing so, they robbed from the fans the sense of accomplishment.

 

I think the thing you are forgetting is numbers @Pobody's Nerfect in the overall battle ewoks and rebels out numbered the troopers 4 or 5 to 1.For the first half of that battle the Ewoks were getting trashed. However the initial attack allowed the Alliance commandos chance to break free and begin fighting too. As the storm troopers were drawn further into the woods and into thinner ranks then the Ewoks superior numbers, their knowledge of the area, prepared booby traps and rebels help all allowed the Ewoks to overcome the superior training of the storm troopers.

 

Another point of view on why the Ewoks were able to take down a legion of the Empire's best troops was simply the Force was with them. It's the day after Leia finds out that she is a Skywalker, and though she may not had the ability to use the Force, It seems that she believed that she had the same power that Luke had, a power that she thought she could never understand. Not believing, as Yoda tells us, is why Luke failed to levitate his X-Wing from the swamp. Leia's excepting and believing who she was and what she was capable of doing was really her first step in Force training. I believe her presence alone on the forest moon put the Force in her, the Ewoks, and her companions favor.

 

Sure, she could be using some sort of Battle Meditation, even if she actually had no idea she was doing it. I never thought of it, but it makes sense.

 

My problem with the Ewoks from day one was the fact that they were not only aimed at a much younger audience than Star Wars had ever been aimed before (the original target audience was 12-14 year olds, which is exactly where I was in May of 1983) but they were also one of the laziest and least inspired character/creature designs in the entire Star Wars saga.

They were teddy bears. Literally. Right down to their round little teddy bear ears. Put 'em in skins and hand them pointed sticks, it doesn't change the fact that you're looking at a friggin' teddy bear wearing skins and holding a pointed stick.

One of the things that had grabbed my attention from the very first time I saw the original Star Wars was the array of creatures that populated the SW universe. I was fascinated by them, and when The Art Of Star Wars was published a year or two later, I couldn't get enough of the concept art for the Mos Eisley creatures. I started trying to draw them on my own, and actually got pretty good at drawing some of them. The one thing that I felt ESB lacked was enough new alien races, though we did get a couple pretty cool ones in the bounty hunters. ROTJ certainly made up for that, particularly with the scenes in Jabba's palace and on the sail barge.

And of course, some creature designs were better than others. A number of the cantina denizens in the original film were basically just store-bought Halloween masks combined with a flight suit or a set of robes. But there were so many other great creature designs there that the tattier ones just tended to blend in.

So, when I saw ROTJ for the first time and there were suddenly TEDDY BEARS running around onscreen for half of the movie... OY!

I never had any problem with the fact that an easily underestimated race of underdogs helped to defeat the Empire. What I had a real problem with was the fact that Lucas and company couldn't be bothered to draw up an interesting, unique new creature to fill that underdog role. They just dressed a bunch of little people up in teddy bear costumes and called it a day. Hell, they may as well have dressed them up as bunny rabbits at that point.

What was worse was, LFL actually tried to keep the reveal of the Ewoks a secret for as long as they could prior to the film's release. The first run of the new ROTJ action figures had the two Ewok figures blacked out on the back of the package, and I'm pretty sure they didn't feature the Ewoks in the pre-release trailers. So there was this deliberate build-up to the eventual reveal of the Ewoks... and they turned out to be virtually identical to a toy that almost every kid in the United States had had since we were infants.

So, suddenly we went from Star Wars featuring a growing rogue's gallery of creatures like Greedo, Hammerhead, Bossk, Jabba, Boba Fett (who, at that point, could still have been anything under that mask!) to a bunch of children's stuffed animals running aound throwing rocks at stormtroopers and making cute little squeaky noises.

And what 14 year old boy wants to sit there drawing teddy bears on the back of his homework, I asks ya?!

THAT'S why I never particularly liked the Ewoks.

 

I think if the Ewoks were more of a fierce creature, they would have caught on, like mauling a Scout Trooper or something.

 

I think they did a good job of showing the Ewoks as being like ferocious tribal animals but without being too violent, like when they butcher the walker pilot to death (slightly) offscreen, and how its implied that they cooked and ate the stormtroopers after the battle.

 

Yeah, I know. I've just never been able to take the image of teddy bears pummeling a stormtrooper even vaguely seriously. It's like trying to find a way to like Jar Jar... try though I might, it ain't happening.

"Teddy bears... why'd it have to be teddy bears?"

 

What he said.

 

I never had a problem with the Ewoks. But I did have a problem with stormtroopers becoming complete wusses. They're wearing armor and a rock from a sling can knock them out? Maybe its that the armor is designed for use against energy weapons...oh wait, blaster bolts go right through it too. I have to agree with @Pobody's Nerfect there. I think if the Ewoks were sliding their spears in between the Troopers armor joints and really savagely killing some Stormtroopers it would be different. Or if they had like 10 times as many Ewoks and just swarmed the imperials.
But, that said, I think the Ewoks were cool. I loved when Han was tring to blow that torch out.

 

I really hate the Ewoks, and have hated them since the very first time I saw ROTJ. Here are my various and numerous reasons:

1) They were clearly a marketing ploy, as if Lucas didn't make enough on the toys from ANH and ESB. I have zero respect for decisions made in that fashion. Toys SHOULD be subservient to the movie. But Lucas made the movie subservient to the toys. Sadly, this was a sign of worse things to come for the SW universe.

2) Princess Leia gets separated from the group after the bike chase, ok cool. What does her character do next? We find out when she emerges from an Ewok hut wearing Robinson Crusoe clothes, and having allowed to the Ewoks to style her hair. Why would anyone on an important military mission do this? Did they make those giant sized clothes on the spot? Or did they have it sitting around from their last human visitor, whom they decided to eat? Why is she treated like a queen, and all the others treated like a meal? Well Leia, so much for destroying the shield generator. And thanks to Lucas for making the Princess into a caricature while introducing convoluted plot points.

3) Han, Luke, and company get caught in an Ewok trap. R2 gets them out by cutting the net. So far that's fine. Then the Ewoks surround our hero's, tie them up, and carry them back to eat them. Why do Luke and Han permit this? Isn't this waste of time detrimental to their mission? Just as it was with Leia, it makes no sense at all. The idea that they would allow Ewoks to tie them up and carry them back is just inane.

4) When the Ewoks fight the storm troopers, did they have all those traps already set for the AT-ATs, or did they simply make them real quick like Leia's outfit? Remember the catapult launching rocks, the pile of logs that caused an AT-AT to fall, the two logs tied up at elevation that crushed an AT-AT, and the little glider armed with rocks to drop. All of that defies common sense. They live their life using rocks, spears, and nets to hunt for small game. They would have no need or knowledge for big complex traps like that.

5) And exactly as several posters have stated, the Emperor placed his "best troops" on Endor. The fact that Teddy Bears can defeat them so easily is just plain insulting to the intelligence of the viewer. And for those who say that the storm troopers were wiping the Ewoks up early in the battle, please think carefully about this next question: how many Ewoks perished in the fight? We were only shown one single casualty. And that brings me to...

6) War is hell, or least it was until the Ewoks showed up. Sadly this style of movie making (pandering to really small kids) carries over into the PT with the Gungans and C3PO's head on a battle droid. Compare the Ewoks to what we saw previously: an entire planet destroyed by the Death Star, storm troopers blasting through the door and killing the rebel troops, Vader using torture on Han, virtually all X-wings getting shot down in ANH, Walkers blowing everything to kingdom come, and the second Death Star blowing up rebel cruisers. It was adult themed, but not graphic so kids could enjoy. All of that stands in stark contrast to the Ewoks. The Teddy Bears were out of place tonally in the OT. I actually think that the overwhelming success of ROTJ emboldened Lucas to take that concept even farther. The results were tragic. IMO the seeds of failure of the PT were planted by the Ewoks.

 

Agree with almost everything. But point No. 4 could be argued that the ewoks had already set all those traps in preparation for a future attack. The Imperials had incurred on their lands and the base had to have been there for years. Maybe the ewoks were already planning on attacking? *grasps at straws*

 

I don't know about that - was the noble trio of Rebel Alliance heroes we know and love supposed to just shoot all the Ewoks?