Ewoks, could you lighten up a little?
Let me digress for a second – I wrote the next post in this series, on the first episode of Droids, before I wrote this one. Droids and Ewoks aired together on Saturday mornings as part of an hour-long block called The Ewoks and Droids Adventure Hour. I initially couldn’t figure out which aired first, so I arbitrarily started with Droids, but in writing that post and doing a little research, I found that Ewoks actually aired first in the block. I’m doing this watch-through in release order, and since Ewoks technically was released first, I’m swapping these essays. Does it matter? Probably not to you, but I’m the type of person who agonized over whether the kiddie game show Jedi Temple Challenge should be included in this series because I’m not including non-fiction, but Ahmed Best’s host character Kelleran Beq appeared in The Mandalorian, so does that make it an in-universe show? I ultimately decided yes, I would include it, even though the first episode would be my 457th Nothing But Star Wars post and I am extremely unlikely to ever get that far. So YES whether Droids aired before Ewoks or vice versa is important to me.
What was I saying? Oh, right. In my next post, which I have already written, I’ll talk a bit about why I skipped the Droids and Ewoks cartoons the first time around. This is my first time watching Ewoks, and I was unprepared. Nelvana, the animation company who produced Ewoks, also made Care Bears, and I assumed they would be somewhat similar in tone. But no! Ewoks is surprisingly dark. There’s certainly some kiddie humor at the start, with Wicket constantly getting into trouble with grumpy Aunt Bozzie. But when the evil witch Morag casts a spell on the firefolk (getting a name after their first appearance in Caravan of Courage), transforming them into actual creatures of flame so they’ll burn down the Ewoks’ forest, the queen of the little sprites screams, and it’s kind of horrific. The rest of the episode is the Ewoks’ battling the raging inferno, and of course they triumph thanks to the Chekhov’s fire-fighting foam they conveniently invented in the first act.
I don’t want to oversell it, this is still Ewoks, not Batman: The Animated Adventures, and much of the story is devoted to Wicket learning a Very Important Lesson about lying. But since this first episode was written by Paul Dini, who also developed and wrote some of the best episodes of Batman, I suppose it’s not too big a stretch to draw a comparison.
But is it queer? Well, the boy Ewoks do sneak off to play a game called drop-the-sack, but it’s just one of them running around on the ground with a target on his back while the others sit in the trees and try to hit him with what they say are sacks of mud, but which is probably Ewok dung.
Also, the boys are punished for lying by being given sentry duty at an outpost, and when they burst in on the two adult male Ewoks watching over them, it sure looks like they’re sharing a bedroll. Except now Wookiepedia tells me that they’re Wicket’s two older brothers, so I guess there wasn’t any hanky-panky going on. (At least, I certainly hope not.)
Come to think of it, I’ve never seen Care Bears. Does it go this hard too?
Previous: Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure (1984)
Next: Droids S1E1 – “The White Witch” (1985)
