I was twelve years old, just starting eighth grade, when the Droids and Ewoks cartoons premiered. Despite being a big Star Wars fan, I skipped them. I wasn’t too old for cartoons quite yet – a quick glance at the Saturday morning cartoon lineup for Fall of 1985 reveals a couple of shows I was still watching, like Dungeons and Dragons, Super Friends: The Legendary Super Powers Show, and a particular favorite of mine, Kidd Video (not just because pubescent me found the actor who played the live action version of Kidd Video super cute, but mainly because pubescent me found the actor who played the live action version of Kidd Video super cute).

But I did think of myself as too old for cutesy kid cartoons like The Smurfs, Snorks, or, I thought, Droids. I don’t know why, but I assumed Droids was a silly comedy, so I gave it a miss. I was wrong! While there’s certainly plenty of comedy, this first episode was an adventure romp which looks to be setting up a serialized story. That would have been right up my alley in 1985!

The animation is just my thing, too. The show was made by Nelvana, a Canadian animation studio probably better known for Inspector Gadget, the Beetlejuice series, and the cartoon that introduced Boba Fett to the world in the (sigh) Star Wars Holiday Special. I’ve always appreciated Nelvana’s style, even if a lot of their shows didn’t quite attract my interest. Droids is really gorgeous, allowing for the budget and the time period. Much more fluid than, say, Filmation’s stable of shows (no shade to Filmation – I could do a whole series on He-Man). And their character design is top notch – there’s no missing a Nelvana character, with their somehow both realistic and exaggerated looks.

But is it queer? That’s what we want to know, is this Saturday morning cartoon from 1985 queer? No, of course not, don’t be silly. But… but! The two main male characters Thall and Jord, a racing team and best buddies, could certainly be a couple. There’s nothing to contradict it, especially not the complete lack of any hint of romantic overtones between either of them and the main female character, Kea. So until a future episode tells me otherwise, when Thall and Jord’s racing landspeeder The White Witch is a-rocking, don’t come a-knocking.

Oh, also C-3PO gets hit on the head, suffers some sort of robot concussion, and mutters in a daze, “R2-D2, you look lovely!” I can’t begin to understand the complexities of droid gender, but that was pretty gay.

Previous: Ewoks S1E1 – “The Cries of the Trees” (1985)
Next: Ewoks S1E2 – “The Haunted Village” (1985)

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)

Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure isn’t bad. It’s not good. But it’s not bad.

It’s just not terribly interesting. The plot is a bog-standard A to B to C adventure quest, made up of scenes of almost everything animate or inanimate on the moon of Endor trying to murder two children, interspersed with scenes of Ewoks doing Ewok things. The stop-motion creatures are fun, but the decision to have Burl Ives narrate does undercut the dramatic tension a bit. When he introduces the lair of the dreaded Gorax, it’s about as frightening as Rudolph confronting the Bumble.

The Ewoks are the reason for the season, though, and I’m very happy that the film doesn’t overplay the comedy. I was worried we were in for (shudder) Holiday Special-ish slapstick, but no, these Ewoks are much the same as the ones we met in Return of the Jedi. They’re funny in a (mostly) realistic fashion, and they remain brutal killers when appropriate. Tempered slightly for the younger intended audience, of course – there’s no bashing in of Stormtroopers’ skulls, but they do slaughter a couple of monsters, and I’m pretty sure if the little girl hadn’t been so cute and helpless, they would have happily killed and eaten her older brother.

Also, apparently magic exists in the Star Wars universe? Not the Force, but actual magic? I guess we’re just supposed to roll with that. One of the better scenes involves Mace, the human boy, being teleported under the surface of a lake, which, from the underside, is solid as ice. It’s one of the few moments with some real dramatic tension, as everything the Ewoks do to save him fails (except for the very last thing they try, of course), but that lake is definitely magic. As far as Lucasverse vibes go, Ewoks notwithstanding, Caravan of Courage is more Willow than Wars.

Previous: Return of the Jedi (1983)
Next: Ewoks S1E1 – “The Cries of the Trees” (1985)

I shouldn’t talk about the Ewoks. I’m about to watch – and write individual posts about – both Ewok movies and every episode of their cartoon. I’m going to have to find a lot of things to say about Ewoks. So I should not waste my post on Return of the Jedi by talking about the Ewoks.

Let’s talk about the Ewoks.

I loved them when I first saw Jedi, of course. I was ten years old, and the Ewoks were for me. I mean, that’s the cynical view, right? They’re just in there for the merchandising possibilities? Well, if that’s true, it worked. I loved me some Ewoks.

But I’m an adult now, and trying to watch this as if seeing it for the first time… I still love the Ewoks. If I were to dispassionately analyze the narrative, I’d have to conclude that the Ewoks frigging rock, dude. They’re cute and they’re funny, and it would be easy to play that battle against the Imperials wholly for laughs, but in between scenes of them swinging from vines to knock Stormtroopers over, we get them swarming over a fallen foe to brutally bash them to death. We see a couple of them killed, and one mourning his dead friend. The movie insists we take them seriously. They’re the colonized, killing their colonizers. Who can’t get behind that? (Plenty of people, actually, but nobody I’m interested in knowing.)

I’m pretty sure they ate the dead Stormtroopers. Ewoks are the best.

I also love every other thing about this movie. Leia is really done right by this script. Yes, she’s mostly left out of the family drama, but Carrie Fisher eats that scene where Luke reveals their relationship. Return of the Jedi is almost all action, all the time, so the momentary slow down for what is, I think, the first scene with any significant character-building dialogue between Luke and Leia makes it all the more powerful. Okay, yeah, the whole father/son plotline sidelines the father/daughter dynamic, but even though Leia doesn’t get to take direct part in it, she’s still a constant presence – she’s the last hope if Luke fails, she’s got the potential to be strong in the Force, she’s the one of the two siblings who really needed to be hidden from Vader. Watching this time, I got the feeling that if the Emperor turned Luke, it would be very bad, but if he turned Leia, it would be catastrophic.

Something else I love about Leia, and this goes right across all three movies, is how much of an action star she gets to be. She’s always right in the thick of it – even when she’s captured in Star Wars, she takes charge of her own rescue. In Jedi, she jumps on the speeder bike to chase the Imperials and it’s Luke who has to jump on behind her and hold on for his life. Okay, fine, “Leia kicks ass” isn’t exactly an original thought. But I’m bringing it up because it’s such a perfect thematic justification for her and Luke being twins.

Because both of them display some characteristics that are often considered unusual and some that are considered typical for characters of their gender. I just talked about Leia’s bad-assery, but, I mean, she’s also a princess. She’s an object of desire, from Han and, more disturbingly, from Jabba. (Isn’t it great that she gets to be the one to kill him?) And look at the scene where she first befriends Wicket, by going slow, being kind, offering food. That scene wouldn’t work with Han, or Lando, or…

Well, it would work with Luke, wouldn’t it? I mean, you can imagine that scene playing out almost exactly the same if their positions had been switched. Because as much as Luke is the action hero of these films, he also gets to be soft and gentle in a way that action heroes don’t typically get to be. Especially with this film firmly removing him from the romantic interest category. (One Hoth kiss too late, maybe. Okay, yeah, that kiss in Empire is a little icky in retrospect, but look at it this way – they had no reason to believe they were siblings, but their latent Force abilities were subconsciously telling them they had a strong connection. It’s understandable that they may have briefly mistaken this connection for something else. Now let’s never talk about it again.)

So forget Campbell and his monomyth, Luke’s journey is not the same as… uh… I tried to Google what stories follow the monomyth, and it’s basically every story ever – doesn’t that make it so broad as to be functionally useless for analysis purposes? I’m digressing. All I’m saying is that just as Leia gets to be tough and gentle, so does Luke. They’re the same, and that’s why them being twins, even though it might seem like a plot reveal for the sake of a plot reveal, is thematically perfect. I mean, you want balance in the Force? Forget balancing light and dark, the Skywalker twins are balancing gender expression. That’s the kind of balanced Force I can get behind.

Hey, I found something queer in Star Wars!

Previous: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
Next: Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure (1984)

I saw The Empire Strikes Back in theaters when it was released. It was 1980, so I was seven. I loved it, of course, for all the reasons a seven-year-old is supposed to. (Yoda. The droids. Luke being oh so cool.) (I still preferred the safe boys to the bad boys.)

I’ve seen it many, many times in the years since. I saw it in its first run and subsequent rereleases a couple of times. When the original trilogy special editions were released theatrically in the 90s, I was there every opening weekend. I’ve sat down to watch it numerous times when I’ve come across it on TV. I’ve seen this movie more times that I could possibly count.

But of all those times I’ve watched Empire, the one that sticks in my mind the most, my absolute favorite viewing, took place on a crowded bus.

If you’re not old enough to remember, it’s hard to grasp what an incredibly big deal the original Star Wars trilogy was. For everybody, but especially for kids. It was everything. Toys, comics, books, clothes, every kind of merchandise available – I had them all, and so did almost every kid I knew, because it was the only way to relive the movie. It was three years from Star Wars to Empire – three years with no new Star Wars! That may not seem like a long time now, but think back to when you were seven. Three years was an eternity.

Because once it left the theaters, that was pretty much it. Home release of big movies wasn’t like it is now. There was Pay-Per-View, and a few pay cable movie channels like HBO, and sometimes a VHS or Betamax release, but those were all pretty expensive, and the bigger the movie, the longer it took for it to be distributed in those ways. The money was in theatrical rereleases, so the original Star Wars didn’t see homes until 1982, two years after Empire came out. Empire itself didn’t come out for home viewing until November of 1984.

Which is odd, because my favorite viewing was, as I said, in a bus, not a movie theater, but it definitely took place before November of 1984. My friend Tommy lived down the street from me, and he had a birthday party. I can’t remember exactly when this was, but I’m sure this was before Return of the Jedi came out in 1983, and if I’m wrong about that, Tommy and I weren’t really friends anymore by late 1984 (I had started at a new school).

In any event, Tommy’s parents had hired a clown, who performed for the kids inside his bus, which was parked in front of Tommy’s house, just down the street from mine. I remember we were all sat around a table, I think there were some balloon animal shenanigans, something involving popsicles, and then the clown told us we were in for a special treat. He turned on a little color TV, and that music started, and that opening scroll started, and a bus full of children went fricking bananas.

Because this wasn’t possible. You can’t just watch The Empire Strikes Back whenever you want! That’s madness!

But because of this clown we could, and we did. No idea how he got a copy of it. It was cut-down – I think it ran about an hour, so it must have been butchered to hell. I didn’t care. I enjoyed it even more than I had in the theaters, because it was so unexpected, so special. I sat there with a bunch of kids I mostly didn’t know and we ate popsicles and cheered for Luke and laughed at Yoda and whooped at every laser blast and lightsaber swing. Then it was over, and we were out of the bus and into the afternoon daylight.

I just now watched The Empire Strikes Back again, for the umpteenth time, and it was great. I loved it.

But not quite as much as I loved it in the back of that bus.

Previous: The Star Wars Holiday Special (1978)
Next: Return of the Jedi (1983)