Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #258 Ewoks: Battle For Endor (1985)
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I was seven years old when Return of the Jedi was released in 1983. That means that the Ewoks were created more or less specifically for me, a small child. The outer space teddy bears proved enormously popular with kiddies but enraged dour adults who saw George Lucas’ space opera not as silly space nonsense for children but rather as a secular religion.
I vividly remember buying an action figure of Wicket, the first piece of Star Wars merchandise I would ever own, and gazing adoringly at the Ewok stuffed animals when I perambulated about toy stores as a child.
It’s telling that Ewoks action figures and stuffed animals occupy a place of prominence in my memory but I cannot, for the life of me, remember what I thought about Ewoks as characters in first Return of the Jedi and then a pair of television movies and a cartoon show.
That seems appropriate, since the purpose of Ewoks was twofold: to entertain small, easily distracted children with microscopic attention spans and to sell a fuck-ton of action figures and dolls.
They succeeded spectacularly on both counts, albeit in a way that proved controversial with adult fans who did not want their sacred mythology corrupted by what they saw as baby stuff.
These glowering scolds felt that warrior teddy bears clearly created to sell toys had no place in their make-believe world and while it pains me deeply to agree with people who take Star Wars seriously, they may be right.
The 1985 television movie Ewoks: Battle For Endor, which I am watching as part of a patron-funded ramble through the curious career of online icon, Quaker Oats spokesman and famously young old person Wilford Brimley, occupies an interesting place in the history of Star Wars in that it was released after the original trilogy but before the prequel trilogy.
Ewoks: Battle For Endor is also a television movie, which means it has a television movie budget but its saving grace, unsurprisingly, is that it has the production values you would expect from a Lucasfilm production.
In true George Lucas fashion, from a special effects, spectacle and world-building standpoint, Ewoks: Battle for Endor is undeniably impressive. From a freaky shit to watch while stoned standpoint it’s a winner as well. It won an Emmy for Best Special Effects. That makes sense, since the special effects are blockbuster movie quality. Everything else? Not so much.
From a storytelling, characterization and dialogue level, however, Battle For Endor is consistently appalling, a mawkish, maudlin exercise in desperate heartstrings-yanking that oscillates wildly between nauseating cuteness and bracing grimness.
This television vehicle for the scene-stealing talking teddy bears from Return of the Jedi opens by brutally murdering the family of big-eyed human moppet Cindel Towani (Aubree Miller), a painfully adorable cherub with a crown of golden curls.
Cindel’s dad Jeremitt (a hilariously miscast Paul Gleason, a fine character actor but not one who belongs in outer space) is putting the finishing touches on the family starcruiser and getting ready to leave the forest planet of Endor, on account of it positively overflowing with those creepy little Ewok fucks, when a group of evil Marauders led by Terak (Carel Struycken, of The Addams Family and Twin Peaks fame) kill Jeremitt and the rest of poor Cindel’s family.
This silly space nonsense for children never lets us forget that our plucky heroine’s family are dead, extinct, caput, pushing up daisies six feet under and serving as worm food. This is foregrounded in dialogue poor Miller is forced to deliver, chipper banter like, “My family, they’re all dead.” and “Mommy, Mace, they're dead.”
Yes, this excessively cute little kid’s family are certainly dead. She’s worried that because her family is dead and she’s been taken captive by evil monsters she’s utterly alone in the universe and has no reason for hope.
She perks up once she realizes that she still has a family in the Ewok community, specifically lovable Wicket (Warwick Davis), who won the hearts of children in Return of the Jedi and tested the patience of adults with subsequent projects like this.
In Return of the Jedi the Ewoks spoke Ewokese rather than English but Lucas clearly learned something from the enduring humiliation that is the Star Wars Holiday Special so here they speak English as well as Ewokese.
That’s not necessarily an improvement! I spent the Star Wars Holiday Special wishing I understood what its Wookiee stars were saying, since they communicated exclusively in untranslated Wookieese.
Throughout Ewoks: Battle For Endor, however, I found myself thinking “Man, I wish I couldn’t understand what these Ewoks are saying.”
I love cute things. Hell, I am a died in the wool Elmo apologist. I love children’s shows and characters despite being, in some ways, an adult. The problem is not that the Ewoks are cute. I love cute. The problem is that the Ewoks are way too cute. The Ewoks are downright pornographic in their cuteness.
Ewoks were already way too fucking cute. Making them jibber-jabber about love and friendship and family in monosyllabic baby talk renders them so nauseatingly precious that they make Baby Yoda look like G.G Allin by comparison.
While wandering around Endor looking for food that will keep them from starving to death and joining Cindel’s dead family in the great beyond, they encounter a sort of manic, super-fast space rabbit named Teek who moves so fast that he’s a perpetual blur.
Like the Ewoks, Teek continually crosses the line separating cute from unbearable. Teek lives with Noa, a diminutive, gnome-like hermit who has been living a solitary life on Endor since crashing there as a young man along with a best friend and partner who, needless to say, is long dead.
Noa at first acts deeply irritated by Cindel and Wicket interrupting his life of unbearable loneliness and despair. He isn’t about to let a starving child with a dead family and a talking teddy bear get in the way of his misery.
But his heart is clearly not in it. From the very first time he loudly professes not to want to have anything to do with Cindel or Wicket it’s obvious that Noa will end the film professing his love and admiration for his new friends.
That’s exactly how it plays out. That orneriness wasn’t reduced to Brimley’s onscreen performance. He apparently disliked writer-directors Jim and Ken Wheat so much that he wouldn’t talk to them and instead communicated with production designer Joe Johnston.
The future director of The Rocketeer, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and Captain America is Ewoks: Battle for Endor’s MVP. Brimley unsurprisingly delivers the film’s best performance and thanks largely to Johnston, this looks and feels unmistakably like a Star Wars movie.
That unfortunately extends to creating something that’s visually audacious and incredibly stylish but also deeply unsatisfying, heavy-handed and devoid of substance.
In its final act, Battle for Endor becomes a full-on war movie, with the wily Ewoks defeating an enemy that is far more technologically advanced in what begs to be read as Lucas’ tribute to the heroism of the people and soldiers of North Vietnam.
Battle for Endor is clearly an allegory for how the Viet Cong defeated a superpower and, ultimately, a tribute to the fighting spirit of hardcore Marxists everywhere disguised as an unrelentingly grim movie for kids.
Considering the popularity of Ewoks back in the 1980s and our psychotic need to recycle intellectual property that is even mildly popular, you’d think that Disney would do more with Ewoks these days.
Having just experienced a pure blast of the furry little bastards, however, I can conclusively say that the reason Disney and LucasFilms don’t bring back the Ewoks is because, for the most part, they fucking suck.
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