A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

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...

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...