Strap in, kiddies (and adults who I am calling kiddies), we’re going to have a nice chat about the strangest corner of the Star Wars universe that is completely unknown to the majority of children who grew up on the prequels and their successors. I’m talking about two whole made-for-tv movies that centered on those lovable fluffballs the Ewoks, and their forest moon full of fairies and witches and castles and all sorts of other crap that the Empire and Rebel Alliance didn’t seem to notice when they landed.
George Lucas decided that he wanted to do an Ewok special because his daughter Amanda was super into them, but ABC would only take on the project if it was a movie. According to him, he wanted to “experiment a little” with the economics of television, and these two movies were made on a tiny budget. They also helped him figure out how to make another little fantasy film called Willow. You might remember it.
The first movie is called Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure, and it’s called that because there’s a caravan and it’s full of brave small bears and a couple of kids. It’s all about this kid Cindel Towani and her older brother Mace—
—WAIT A MINUTE. YOU GAVE HIS NAME AWAY TO SAMUEL L. JACKSON?!
Anyway, these kids and their family crash-land on Endor. Wait, no—it’s the forest moon of Endor, that’s what Admiral Ackbar says in Return of the Jedi. But the next movie is called Ewoks: The Battle for Endor, and that’s clearly referencing the forest moon, so….
This already got way too complicated.
Okay, so Cindel and Mace and their useless parents crash on the moon and this weird beast called a Gorax kidnaps ol’ mom and dad. Nearby is the Ewok village, with our pal Wicket and his family. Wicket’s dad Deej (Ewok naming conventions are a mystery to us all) has two missing kids of his own, so he goes out searching and comes across the Towani kids and tries to help them. Mace waves a blaster around, so Deej and his crew knock the kid out and bring them both back to the village where they eat them.
Sorry, that doesn’t happen. Ewoks were all into eating people the last time we saw them, but maybe they have a rule about eating children? Who can say. Well, they can say, but they won’t because—as we know from Return of the Jedi—Ewoks don’t speak galactic Basic. Wait….
https://youtu.be/Atc5NPcWf_A?t=9m47s
They lied.
Now that you are appropriately unsettled, I should point out that Endor has lots of familiar animals on it, for some reason. Like buns and ferrets. There’s a raven in the next one, but that’s just a witch’s magical form, so it probably doesn’t count as an actual raven. Maybe they have ravens on Dathomir. It seems like the kind of Star Wars planet that would have ravens.
There’s a lot of boring stuff that occurs after they make it to Ewok Town: Cindel gets sick and Mace has to get extra medicine, and then he wants them to escape because he thinks that the Ewoks are just animals, and then the two get stuck inside a tree after they get attacked by a boar-wolf. That boar-wolf somehow has one of their family bracelets, which features a light indicator on it for each of their parents, signaling that they’re still alive. Deej and his progeny come to their aid and Mace has to admit that bear friends are pretty darn helpful in a pinch. The village shaman Ewok (this guy) figures out where the Towani mater and pater are, which freaks everyone out because the Gorax is bad news—Ewoks can kill stormtroopers and bring down AT-STs, but this is a really bad idea. Deej and fam still offer to help because they’re stand-up bears.
There’s a ceremony to see the party off, and they are each given special tokens that belonged to Ewok warriors of old. Deej gets the White Wings of Hope, Weechee gets the Red Wings of Courage, Wicket gets a magic walking stick, Widdle gets the Blue Wings of Strength, Cindel gets the Candle of Pure Light, and Mace gets… a rock. He deserves it really. At least Cindel is a nice kid who becomes buddies with Wicket. Mace is grouchy and disrespectful to bear friends (who sometimes eat people, but he doesn’t know that). Wicket, being way nicer to strangers than he needs to be, picks up the rock when Mace tosses it aside, for safe keeping.
The adventure is ridiculously long, and on the way they get into several jams. They persuade a woodcutting Ewok warrior from another tribe to go with them after an axe-throwing contest, they hang out with an Ewok priestess, Mace gets trapped under magic water, then they make friends with the Queen of the wisites (basically fire fairies), Izrina. Eventually they make it to the Gorax’s fortress. Yeah, he’s got a fortress. Apparently the Empire was not interested in using any infrastructure left over on the planet when they arrived. Which is too bad because housing a shield generator in a freaking fortress would have been rad. Mace’s rock turns out to contain a special instrument that allows them to find their way, which is wrong—it should have just been a rock.
Mace and cohort rescue his parents. (Cindel waits outside with Wicket and Widdle because they are the smol ones.) Apparently, Towani ma and pa haven’t been eaten because the Gorax keep some of their captured creatures as pets? In weird cages? Sure.
And then there’s a happy reunion, and everyone is just pleased as pisco sours that the Towani family is together, and now they can somehow repair their damaged ship in the middle of a forest without a garage nearby, and nothing can possibly go wrong.
Did I mention there’s a sequel?
The Battle for Endor had the same problem that the first Ewok movie had: how do you create a movie about a kid having adventures with her tiny woodland pals when adults are nearby, and she’s constantly bothered by a really annoying brother? So the sequel had a creative thought—
—KILL THEM.
Apparently, George Lucas had just watched Heidi with his daughter and was really keen on having the next movie focus on Cindel. So the film starts with Cindel’s entire family—complete with recast parents—getting attacked by Sanyassan Marauders (these guys crash landed on Endor a century earlier and the Empire didn’t seem to notice them either), and every single one of them dies. Remember those bracelets that the Towani family has, with the light indicators for each family member? Cindel sees her mother’s light go out and realizes mom is dead. Then she finds Mace right before he gets blown up. Then her dad gets shot trying to defend her from the pirates, and they have a little goodbye before he tells her to run, warding off more of the Marauders as she makes her escape.
First off: Whoa, movie. Second: Yes, Cindel gets to do her own thing, whooooo Cindel! Nobody wears space workout gear like you, girl. And third: Who invented those sadistic bracelets, what the hell is wrong with people, who would ever want a bracelet that blinked out lights when your loved ones were dying and deaded, you monsters.
I should mention that the Marauders are being led by this woman:
Who is probably Maleficent’s godmother, or the sister who taught her everything she knows. That’s Charal, who was retconned into being a Nightsister. Which makes sense. Because she’s basically a witch, but Star Wars doesn’t have witches, it just has certain Force-users who look a loooooot like witches. Nightsister it is. She has a ring that lets her turn into a raven. She stole it because she is just that boss.
So Charal captures Cindel and the whole Ewok village, and they load all of them up into carts and drag them off. Cindel tells Wicket about her family being dead, and he assures her that the Ewoks are her family now. The two of them escape the cart and run away, getting trapped in a cave by rock fall. Wicket makes a glider, but then there’s a condor dragon and it tries to kidnap Cindel too, and Wicket has to use the glider to go after her, and then they’re sleeping rough in the woods. They run into a very irritating speedy gremlin called a Teek, and he leads them to a house that seems abandoned and messy. Cinder tells Wicket they should try to straighten the place up and live there, but it turns out to be occupied by a grumpy old man named Noa, who wants nothing to do with their problems. (Yes, he is also just THERE, everyone sets up shop on Endor’s moon because why not, they are the California redwoods, after all.) He tries to kick them out, but they come back with wildflowers, and he’s clearly starting to soften on them.
Charal is working for his guy named Terak who wanted the power source of the Towani ship for some ritual. He’s worried that the power supply isn’t the right one, but Charal thinks it would be fine if Cindel hadn’t escaped. So Terak suddenly cares a lot about finding the kid. He screams about it a bunch. Uh-oh.
Cindel and Wicket follow Noa one day to find out where he goes off to and find a crashed ship. They set off a trap, and Noa comes to get them. It turns out, Noa and his friend Salak crashed in this ship on their first mission together. Their crystal oscillator shattered, so Salak set out to find another one (because that sounds like a common part you find lying around) and never came back. Cindel sings a song for Noa that her mother used to sing because they are bonding now. The next day, she is lured out of the house by a lady in white who is singing her mother’s song. That woman turns out to be Charal in disguise and she kidnaps the kid. Noa, Wicket, and Teek head after them. Charal takes Cindel to Terak’s castle, where he tells the little girl to make the power converter work with magic or he’ll hurt all the Ewoks.
Yeah, the Empire doesn’t care about putting shield generators in castles either, apparently.
Charal interrogates Cindel—eventually revealing to the girl that Salak came to ask Terak about a power source and was killed for it. Noa and friends come rescue everyone from the castle, and Cindel is able to tell him what happened to his pal. They take the power source and leave. We do get to see Salak in the castle before they head out, and he’s not looking so great:
Terak is so angry, he takes Charal’s ring from her once she’s in raven form, so she can’t change back. His Marauders head to the Ewok village and there’s a big old fight. Noa gets his ship running with the power converter and tries to fight Terak, badly. Wicket ends up using his slingshot to hit Terak in his fancy amulet, reducing the guy to dust. (It’s just that easy! Hey, someone should try that on Vader’s chest plate too!) The bad guy is defeated and the Ewoks are free. After it’s all settled, Cindel and Noa take off in his repaired ship. Where are they going? Who knows!
I should also mention that both of these films are supposed to take place one year before Return of the Jedi. Originally it was set something like 150 years in the future, but they decided that it didn’t make sense for Wicket to still be a kid, so it was changed to just a few years after the Battle of Yavin. So all this stuff happened right before the Empire showed up. Which means that Wicket could talk to Leia the entire time and just chose not to because he’s a little sh*t.
I’m just kidding, attempting to graft a timeline onto these stories is totally meaningless.
And now you know that they exist! Or have been reminded of them! And while they are ridiculous in the extreme… I loved them as a kid. Especially the second one. You know, since there was an amazing space witch and Mace wasn’t around to ruin it.
Yeesh. Sorry, Mace. That got dark.
Emmet Asher-Perrin could really use some style tips from Cindel. You can bug her on Twitter and Tumblr, and read more of her work here and elsewhere.
Awwww do we have to revist the Ewok movies, can’t you just show us a slide show of vacation pics instead… fine I’ll read it.
I actually loved these movies as a kid too, then I watched them as an adult and verbally berated my inner child for a few hours.
Weren’t these movies at least roughly in continuity with the Ewoks cartoon series from Nelvana? (And yes, please cover the Ewoks and Droids cartoons next. From the people who made the only watchable part of the Holiday Special!)
By the way, the first movie’s original title was just The Ewok Adventure, both on US television and the original home-video release. The Caravan of Courage title was used for its overseas theatrical release and for the 2004 DVD release.
I’ve rewatched these in recent years. The first one is dead boring, mostly talking down to the audience. The second one is actually still good as a kid-oriented film. Fun fact: the duo that directed the second one also wrote Pitch Black.
Totally with you on the bracelets. Most evil invention ever. And, if my practicing of unlicensed engineering has anything to say about it, prone to all sorts of false positives. “Oh, mom’s dead?” “No, just sunspots.” Or, “Sorry, I’m not dead, I was just going through a tunnel.” Yikes.
Maybe the bracelets also act as a universal translator?
I loved these movies, though, not for their placement in the Star Wars (E)Universe, but for their sheer quirkiness. And Wilford Brimley. I kept expecting him to berate Cindel for not having a hot bowl of Quaker oatmeal or something.
Also, it’s comforting to know that Cindel overcame the obstacles of her childhood to become one of the galaxy’s most renowned journalists. At least, in the Legends universe.
the bracelets would be very useful technology in a Walking Dead type situation
Put me in as another vote for the Ewoks/Droids rewatch (assuming you can find the complete series in reasonable quality).
I maintain that Caravan of Courage is still impressive for how it manages to have a fellowship of well-developed characters despite the fact that most of them have no facial expressions and only speak gibberish –they have more clearly-defined identities than the human characters in most modern blockbusters.
I especially love the Wistie scene, where everyone gets a character-appropriate reaction (including Kaink, who is the only one not freaking out about the fire-pixies overhead, but is carefully noting what everyone else is doing, and is thus the first to notice Cindel with the candle).
And abandoning the language kinda makes sense, given that the very next humans the Ewoks meet are monsters who exterminate entire villages and poison the Forest. Bright Tree Village probably mythologized Cindel as a harbinger of doom who brought the Empire down on them; speaking her language now is likely forbidden –assuming anyone other than Wicket learned it in the first place.
I loved the second one as a kid, watched it a lot of times. I think my kid brain completely blocked the killing of Cindel’s family at the beginning of the movie or I watched a censored version.
Chronology-wise, these telemovies would be so much easier to accommodate if they happened during a completely different era, one unrelated to the First Galactic Empire of Palpatine of Naboo, and if Wicket just happened to be a common name among Ewok tribes … if only the Powers That Be didn’t insist that it’s the same Wicket and that the timing is proximate to ROTJ. As for Salak looking for a spare oscillator — well, the galaxy has had cheap hyperspace travel for millenia, and if a planet is on a hyperspace route and can be crashed on, it’s probably been crashed on repeatedly. (It’s got Noa and the Towani family, right? Mean time between mishaps 20 years, multiplied over 10,000 years, divided by the surface area of an M-class planet…) Probably they’re all got scattered hermits, too, fleeing the galaxy’s ecumenopoli (the Trantor-like city-planets, of which Coruscant is apparently not the only one).
The thing about these movies is that they completely fail to jibe with the authoritative exobiological fieldwork of Davo Atten-Boru and Pladdo Cardigun, who spent their last days living among the Ewoks and learning their ways. I can only assume these movies are completely revisionist propaganda works vainly designed to appease their subjects. Which is obviously a waste of time and money that would be better spent securing some kind of shelter on an uncharted Outer Rim world.
I never realized that there were two of those movies…
I don’t honestly remember the first of these two movies but I was deeply traumatized by those bracelets. Who thought they were a good idea? I was also surprised they killed off Cindel’s entire family even if Mace was a tool. It’s a kid movie for crying out loud; can’t they be in a nice coma or something like soap operas they were already using magic. I vaguely remember the cartoon but not enough to have an opinion.
I enjoyed the first one, but the second one was a blur, because my mind never got past the fact that everyone Cindel loved died at the very beginning. Oh, and witches and castles appearing.
I’m not sure that it ever occurred to me before, but reading this, I’d say that Battle for Endor was probably a strong influence on Dave Wolverton’s Courtship of Princess Leia, because not only does the witch evoke a Nightsister, but the planet Dathomir really resembled-in-description Endor in these little films before it was reimagined as a creepy red nightmare in The Clone Wars. And, there was a wrecked ship, as well as the fact that the witches were descended from a Jedi stranded on the planet (although as an exile, not wreck-survivor). If someone could ever adapt that novel into a fan-film shot in similar forests, it could be some consolation for losing the book’s vision of these things.
Anyway, I enjoy the whimsical, nature-and-fantasy feeling of these films. There’s just something cut and charming about it.
I remember loving the Ewok cartoons as a kid (I still want to live in a tree house, my mortgage advisor disagrees). I suspect they have not held up well.
The bracelets sound almost like a wristwatch version of the Weasley’s clock from Harry Potter.
I picked these up together on a DVD a few years back, and my kids enjoy them – my young kids, anyway. I think you’ve adopted the right tone. It’s kid stuff with Star Wars trappings, don’t think too hard about it.
I bought these two on dvd in a fit of nostalgia a few years ago, due to fuzzy childhood memories of Caravan of Courage. I don’t remember ever watching the second one as a kid.
Anyway I settled down for a nostalgia movie night with my sister. Turns out my fuzzy childhood memories had betrayed me. We were unprepared for that level of 80’s-ness. My sister refused to watch the second one. She took the chocolate bowl prisoner and held it hostage until I agreed to watch something else. So we watched Flight of the Navigator instead.
So I still havent watched The Battle for Endor. Maybe I’ll ambush her with it next Nostalgia Night…
I remember seeing Caravan of Courage multiple times on TV and enjoying it, but I barely recall Battle for Endor. I know I’ve seen it at least once, but it apparently didn’t get as much play as CoC.
I completely blame CoC for contributing to my arachnophobia. That scene where they fight the huge gross spider always scared the hell outta me. That plus the scene with Mace getting trapped under that water caused trauma in many many kids I’m sure.
I’m quite sure I’ve read at least one book where there were some kind of “life jewels” that glowed as long as the person they indicated was alive. I didn’t get the idea from the Ewok movie, because I never saw it. In a day before reliable long-distance communication, people must often have longed for some way of knowing whether a faraway loved one was alive or dead. Even now in the USA, there are people who are desperate to know whether a disappeared loved one is alive or dead. They would give a great deal to know for sure. I think what makes the bracelet seem cruel in this movie is the extreme tragedy of the set-up itself, where a young child is bereft of all three members of her immediate family, with no caring humans in sight. Thought experiment: what if her whole family had been killed and she never found out whether they were dead, or were being held and tortured, or had been mind-altered into forgetting her? Wouldn’t that arguably be worse?
@7 Ryamano–just curious, had you seen the first movie before you saw and enjoyed the second? It occurs to me that the tragedy might not seem like a big deal to a child viewer who hadn’t gotten to know the family members in the earlier movie. So as a standalone kids movie it might work differently. It might feel more like all those children’s books where the kids are orphans at the outset, the better to allow them to have adventures without parental oversight. Those books rarely if ever suggest that the children are affected by their loss in an ongoing way.
@18 Yeah, in the Dragonlance series, there is a piece of jewelry called a Starjewel that links two wearers, and dims when one perishes. Sturm Brightblade received one from Alhana Starbreeze. I saw Battle for Endor before I read the books, but the bracelets seem like poor imitations of the Starjewels.
A helpful hint for watching and surviving these movies: watch from the Ewoks’ point of view, not the kids. Then it becomes a story about a long-suffering family having to deal with these goofy-ass incompetent aliens. And you discover the Ewok word for “you idiot,” because it gets used a lot.
@@.-@: Indeed, I believe that’s the reason these two films were retroactively placed before Return of the Jedi. I still own copies of the Black Fleet Crisis book trilogy (written by Michael P. Kube-McDowell in the 1990’s) where Cindel has clearly grown to adulthood. And those books take place roughly 12-13 years after Episode VI. She’d be around 20 years old or so.
Recently seen on another website:
http://nerdist.com/is-captain-phasma-secretly-the-little-girl-from-ewoks-the-battle-for-endor/
Holy Sh**…. That’s the legendary Sian Phillips as Charal, aka Bene Geserit Extraordainre, Queen Cassiopeia Empress Livia Sian Phillips!!!
I looooved Battle for Endor as a kid. Watched it over and over.
It wasn’t until I was in my twenties that I realized it was a Star Wars movie lol. Blew my mind. I don’t think I’d seen any Star Wars until much later in life, and just never made the connection.
The picture with Terak surfaced some kind of suppressed childhood terror in me. That makeup!! Ahhh!
I love this article and this writer, you’ve put up some of my favorite content lately, thank you!
My mom found me a VHS copy of Caravan in a thrift shop at the height of my Star Wars mania, I promptly made her regret her generosity by watching it WAY too much.
I saw “The Battle for Endor” before I’d seen the first one. I was horrified as an adult (okay, a college student) at those bracelets.
But more horrified to find out that they killed the kid’s family once I’d seen “Ewok Adventure”. Wow. Just wow.
Sian Phillips! She rocked!
They reviewed Caravan of Courage on the We Hate Movies podcast a few years back. Had me laughing so hard I had tears in my eyes. Their Brimley impressions are infectious.
@19. While reading a book on folklore, I came across a predecessor to the death bracelets. The Iroquois hero Dekanawida left a life token for his mother, namely an otter skin nailed to her lodge by its tail. If it vomited blood, then he had died by violence.
…I’ll take the jewels, thanks.
@11 – Robin: Disney films are kid movies, and in many the main characters lose their only parent, or both.
@22 – AlanBrown: Ugh, those fan theories get worse every day.