Q&As About 'Star Wars': Why did George Lucas decide on Ewoks instead of Wookies for the battle in Return of the Jedi?

Ralph McQuarrie production painting for Return of the Jedi. © 1983 Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL)

Michael Justin, a Quora member, asks:

Why did George Lucas decide on Ewoks instead of Wookies for the battle in Return of the Jedi?

My reply:

There were two reasons why George Lucas changed his original concept of showing the Empire’s defeat at the hands of the Wookiees at the Battle of Endor to the version we see in Star Wars - Episode VI: Return of the Jedi.

The reason Lucas gives in the audio commentary track on the Jedi DVD and Blu-ray is that when he was writing the story for the film, he was making an allusion to the Vietnam War, a conflict that witnessed a technologically superior superpower being handed a humiliating defeat by a bunch of fierce but technologically unsophisticated peasants.

Remember, Lucas was a young man who came of age in the shadow of the Kennedy assassination and the tragedy of Vietnam. Like many of the college-age kids of that time, he did not support the war and was impressed by how the North Vietnamese and their Viet Cong allies in the South defied the U.S.-led intervention into what was really a civil war between two factions of the same people.

Although Lucas did not consider that the Empire was just an evil version of the United States in space - the color palette and design for the Imperial military was clearly inspired by Nazi Germany - he thought that it would be fitting if the Empire, a galactic superpower with its Star Destroyers, AT-AT and AT-ST walkers, TIE fighters, legions of draftee stormtroopers, and Death Stars, were to be brought down by jungle fighters who were less well-armed.

At first, Lucas figured that the best species that fit the story’s paradigm was the Wookiees. After all, they are big, furry, imposing, and incredibly strong. Plus…bowcasters. You gotta have Wookiees and bowcasters.

But there was a snag. The story called for a technologically unsophisticated species, not merely a grossly overmatched one. Lucas wanted a highly primitive, almost Stone Age culture to help our Rebel star warriors hand Emperor Palpatine his own head on a platter, as it were. But Wookiees, as exemplified by Chewbacca (played by the late Peter Mayhew) are not technologically unsophisticated.

So, that was a problem.

The other reason why Lucas scrapped his Wookiees-as-intergalactic guerrillas was the incredible cost of finding a battalion’s worth of tall extras, seeing if they could learn to move and act like Wookiees. then creating costumes for all of them.

I know that fans sometimes think that Lucas and Lucasfilm probably had unlimited funds to make Return of the Jedi. The reality, of course, is that they did not. And making 100+ Wookiee costumes, each with its own distinct features and accessories, was prohibitively expensive.

In Lucas’ own description of the change (paraphrased, of course), he simply reduced the Wookiees’ height by half and reversed the species’ name (and changed the spelling a bit) to Ewoks.