Talking About 'Star Wars': Is it true that in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, they used Ewoks because they would be cheaper than Wookiees?

Photo Credit: Lucasfilm Ltd. © 1983 Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL)

Is it true that in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, they used Ewoks because they would be cheaper than Wookiees?

There are three reasons why Ewoks were used in Return of the Jedi instead of Wookiees for the Battle of Endor, and the expense of outfitting a large number of extras was certainly one of them.

The Empire Strikes Back, unlike the film that came before - Star Wars - was financed by George Lucas’s Lucasfilm Ltd. It cost $25 million in 1980 dollars, a princely sum in those days, and even though director Irvin Kershner and producer Gary Kurtz did a good job at getting the movie made on time, it still went over budget.

Say what you will about Lucas as a director, but the man is an extremely conservative person when it comes to the business end of filmmaking, so sticking as closely to a projected budget was a big deal for him. Even more so because it was his money on the line, not 20th Century Fox’s, and though Lucasfilm was earning royalties from licensed merchandise, Lucas was not exactly swimming in money between 1980 and 1982, which is the time frame in which both Return of the Jedi and Raiders of the Lost Ark were made and released.

Not only was Lucas having to run a company and pay his employees, but he was also trying to start a family with his then-wife Marcia. In the early pre-production stage of Jedi, the two were still married and were in the process of adopting a baby (Amanda Lucas). And he was also setting up Skywalker Ranch, his dream project of a film production facility where he and other filmmakers he invited could work in a quiet, pastoral environment away from the hectic and more stressful scene in Hollywood.

So despite fans’ and tabloid media notions that Lucas had money to burn (there was one rumor that had him owning a Learjet with an interior tricked out to look like the Millennium Falcon,for instance), the man behind the Star Wars franchise was careful with his money.

In early drafts of the Jedi script, Lucas and Lawrence Kasdan envisioned Wookiees as the stand-ins for the Viet Cong versus the high-tech stand-ins for the Franco-American forces (the Galactic Empire) in the Battle of Endor. Lucas, like many of the directors and screenwriters of the New Hollywood generation, came of age during the Vietnam War, and though he was not Communist, he was fascinated with the notion of how a peasant-led army stood up and defeated two Western countries’ modern armies, even though the Vietnamese paid dearly for their victory. This was a theme that ran throughout the entire Star Wars trilogy, though George Lucas was careful (and canny) enough to make the Empire more like the Nazis than his own countrymen.

So for some time, the primitive-but-fierce allies of the Rebels on Endor were the Wookiees.

That is, until Lucas realized two problems.

The big one, was, of course, the practical one of cost. Not only would Lucasfilm have to hire a platoon’s worth of really tall extras that were physically fit and could take direction, but the costume department would have to create Wookiee outfits for them all.

© 1977 20th Century Fox Film Corporation/Lucasfilm Ltd. 

I don’t know how much Chewbacca’s yak fur/mohair costume cost to make back then, but it couldn’t have been cheap. It was designed by Stuart Freeborn, who designed the “man-apes” in 2001 for Stanley Kubrick almost a decade before working on Star Wars, and it was used in all three films (and the forgettable Star Wars Holiday Special). Because of its materials and workmanship, it was a pricey outfit.

Put yourself, if you can, in Lucas’s shoes, and try to imagine what went through his mind when he realized the expense of making 20 or more costumes like Chewie’s.

The story that Lucas tells in the behind the scenes DVD in the 2004 Star Wars Trilogy box set is not focused so much on cost. Lucas explains that when he first conceived the Wookiees-as-freedom fighters-on-Endor plot point, he saw them as not being tech-savvy. But then he realized that Chewbacca, Han’s co-pilot on the Millennium Falcon, is at home with machinery and space vehicles, so his species could not be credibly portrayed as being primitive.

To paraphrase “The Maker” himself, Lucas solved both problems by reversing the syllables of the word “Wookiees” and turned it into “Ewoks,” then halved the creatures’ height. Thus, the tall, fierce forest dwellers became short and teddy bear-like forest dwellers.

And, of course, even though storytelling was important to Lucas, he also realized that Ewoks would also make good toys and other kid-friendly licensed products. Plush toys, Kenner action figures, coloring books, cookie jars, Meade notebooks, Burger King/Coca-Cola collectible glasses, and all sorts of collectible items all bore the likenesses of Wicket, Paploo, Teebo, and Chief Chirpa, plus countless other Ewoks. Lucas, whose father was a small business owner in Modesto, California, might have been a filmmaker, but he was also a chip off the old block. So even though he loved art and entertaining the masses, he was also a practical entrepreneur.