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...