Under Disney, Lucasfilm may have spread the Star Wars brand thin by producing so many TV shows over the past five years. But lower-rent spin-offs made for the small screen have been part of Star Wars for decades. Case in point: Ewoks: Battle for Endor just marked the 40th anniversary of its first airing on ABC. This means it’s now twice as old as the original Star Wars was at the time of its 1997 special-edition re-release. It’s a reminder that sometimes, chintzy ancillary material helps perpetuate a series in the long years between splashy feature films.
It’s also a reminder that no, George Lucas really wasn’t being disingenuous when he described Star Wars as a property for children. The pair of made-for-TV Ewoks movies that aired in the wake of 1983’s Return of the Jedi make that especially clear. The first one, 1984’s Caravan of Courage, is about siblings Cindel (Aubree Miller) and Mace (Eric Walker) — their surname is Towani, not Windu — searching for their parents after the family’s starship crashes on the forest moon Endor, site of a climactic Return of the Jedi battle. During their search, Cindel befriends Wicket (Warwick Davis), the Ewok who serves as the tribe’s cuddliest ambassador, and has even begun to learn certain English words, E.T.-style.
In 1985’s Battle for Endor, Cindel’s entire family (Mace included!) is quickly, somewhat unceremoniously killed off by a group of invading marauders, which makes this the Ewok version of Alien 3. As Cindel and Wicket flee the carnage, they meet Teek, a fast-moving creature who’s basically an Ewok meets Looney Tunes’ Road Runner, and Noa (Wilford Brimley), a cranky but ultimately kindly hermit stranded on Endor. (These elements are somewhat less like Alien 3.) The group bands together to retrieve the starship power cell snatched from Cindel’s father by head marauder Terak (Carel Struycken) and shapeshifting sorceress Charal (Siân Phillips), which Noa can use to repair his own crash-landed ship and return home.
Star Wars purists may be lost at “shapeshifting sorceress,” and Charal does indeed transform into a bird. But in its pokey, corny, kid-friendly way, Battle for Endor does get at the genre tug-of-war that animates Star Wars to begin with: Is this a science fiction franchise, with its advanced robotics and interstellar travel, or is it fantasy, with the Force as pseudo-scientific magic and the Jedi as space wizards? Even though the power cell is the movie’s McGuffin, Terak and Charal don’t actually know what it does, beyond the assumption that it must hold some kind of dominion over the stars. Cindel, meanwhile, seems unfazed by Charal’s mysterious powers, despite presumably having no real context for anything like them.
In a way, this story — devised by Lucas, then handed over to siblings Ken and Jim Wheat to write and direct — sees the sci-fi/fantasy hybridization of Star Wars through a child’s eyes. It’s all different forms of magic in the end, and the inclusion of a sorceress doesn’t break canon so much as expand the weird mysteries of this vast universe, something younger viewers have far less of a problem accepting than veteran fans. Kids who really love the Ewoks are unlikely to bat an eye over the fact that much of Battle for Endor plays out like a medieval-style fantasy adventure, with the Return of the Jedi forest clash rehashed at the end. (Honestly, seeing Ewoks get hold of some blasters in this movie is nearly as adult-jarring as watching a woman transform into a bird.)
This doesn’t mean Battle for Endor is especially entertaining for adults. But it does illustrate how even a throwaway TV movie can serve as a vehicle for someone’s expression of what Star Wars means to a particular audience. That’s true even when that vehicle keeps getting moved around the parking lot. Before these movies were de-canonized into the “Legends” category with other Expanded Universe novels, games, and so on, they couldn’t even remain stable on the existing timeline. First they were presumed to take place following Return of the Jedi; later, they were retconned earlier in time to take place sometime before it.
It’s also fun to see which bits and pieces of the film creator-nerds have salvaged for future Star Wars projects. Blurrgs, for example — the foreshortened, vaguely fishlike land creatures the marauders ride in this film — were brought back into the live-action fold with The Mandalorian. They’re a truly wonderful, unusual creature design.
Charal’s status as a witch in a Star Wars TV project, meanwhile, makes her ahead of her time, given the presence of the Nightsisters in Clone Wars and related witches in The Acolyte, a show that unaccountably made some fans freak the hell out for any number of reasons, including that some of its characters were witches. One of the most endearing aspects of Star Wars as a franchise is how various spin-offs have been consigned to trivial, marginal, or even actively decanonized corners of the galaxy, and yet certain characters, details, or ideas from those spin-offs manage to persevere and re-emerge as part of some future endeavor.
At its worst, this tendency is precisely the deep-dive, alienating lore dependence that coined the inventive (though now, like all brilliant coinages, terribly overused) term Glup Shitto. It can also be frustrating for Star Wars fans craving something genuinely new, rather than constant crate-digging through the archives for inspiration. Both Ewoks movies are tagged as “Star Wars Vintage” on Disney Plus, which makes them sound suspiciously like an action-figure line. That’s the potentially depressing endgame of finding inspiration in old Star Wars media: a bunch of filmmakers mashing their action figures together in public, possibly while someone dictates ideas from Reddit.
At the same time, there’s a certain audience-agnostic faith in this repurposing that links Star Wars to the sprawling, glorious mess of comic-book continuities that cannot be fully untangled, no matter how many #1 issues Marvel or DC put out. The familiar calls to erase this or that supposedly ruinous creative Star Wars decision — like the sequel trilogy, which some fans would love to simply pave over — seem like failures to truly understand what Star Wars is, instead wanting to refocus it on issuing a single near-perfect feature film every three to five years. Some series definitely register as zombie franchises, revived, expanded, and annotated out of desperation. But marginal oddities like Battle for Endor have been part of Star Wars for the vast majority of its history.
That doesn’t mean it stands on its own, and it definitely doesn’t mean you have to like Ewoks TV movies, The Star Wars Holiday Special, or any number of TV shows with plenty of genuine problems. For my own part, I’m still gobsmacked by those clumsily written filler episodes at the center of an otherwise interesting Obi-Wan Kenobi show, or the pure corporate skittishness that seemed to motivate The Rise of Skywalker, and I have no lingering desire to rewatch either Ewok movie in this lifetime.
But nor do I understand any particular impulse to consider Star Wars “ruined,” whether by Lucas, Kathleen Kennedy, Disney at large, or whoever else. It must not have seemed like a particularly vital cultural force back in the 1980s, when George Lucas put a fair amount of time and money into a pair of Ewok-based TV movies. But some kids enjoyed them, many adults doubtless did not, and eventually some bits and pieces connected back to more interesting works later on, whether coincidentally, superficially, or because someone at current Lucasfilm considers the (other) Battle of Endor an absolutely vital chapter in lost Star Wars history.
Star Wars returning to television should be an obvious sign of how optional all this material actually is, no matter what Disney’s actual hopes that fans gobble everything up excitedly. But the real danger of Star Wars extending its brand in perpetuity isn’t that the brand owners will make another clunky TV series, or something silly for kids; it’s that they’ll discourage either rummaging around in the past or creating something new, out of protective fear of backing the wrong blurrg.
Ewoks: The Battle for Endor is streaming exclusively on Disney Plus. No one else wanted it.
