Why do people hate Ewoks?

[Jarlaxl]

I've never understood it either- but then again it must be because I'm the only one in the world that has the version of the film where the Ewoks were only a distraction at best, had primitive traps that enjoyed roughly the same level of surprise on their technologically superior enemies that Viet Cong booby traps did on their technologically superior enemies, and then once surprise was lost, started getting absolutely slaughtered by their technologically superior enemies. It's a funny old version where Chewy gets hold of an ATST and that saves the day more than anything the Ewoks ever did.

I really should track down this version of RotJ everyone keeps talking about where the Ewoks kill all the stormtroopers themselves and blow up the generator with a slingshot.

because that's what they make it sound like

My sister is mad that Ewok isn't a player race in The Old Republic -____-

It is in Battlefront 2 though- buy her that!

I suppose that this has always been my perspective.

Ewoks also drill the point home about the Rebels being a collection of diverse people, races, and ideas fighting against an oppressive, homogeneous, ruthlessly bureaucratic Imperial army. True, they're small, but they, like everyone else associated with the Rebels, have something to bring to the fight. That always stuck out to me, and I always liked that about them.

I'm willing to let Lucas make boatloads of money off of his creation. The Ewoks never really offended me, though, so maybe that's why.

Edit: Would you have liked the confrontation more if, instead of Ewoks, there were, suppose, some cell of guerrilla fighter humans/humanoids, armed just as much as the Rebel forces, there for some independent organization (let's say a trade federation that was kicked off the planet by Imperials and thus denied a lucrative raw resources harvesting operation)? Or something along those lines?

 

[Thaluikhain]

There was an entire legion of the Emperor's best troops, along with those walker thingies. If the plot is against you, doesn't matter how many men you have.

I suppose just about any story looks silly when you apply common sense/logic to it. Sometimes the trip itself is more important than the story (Avatar thrives on this, despite the plot being overdone horseshit).

Not really...a lot of movies require a dubious grasp of logic to work, but it's hardly a requirement. The standard tends to be set fairly low on regards to this, though.

 

[evilneko]

Begin HeadScratcher/ItJustBugsMe:
You know what gets me? We don't even see most of the fighting. A Roman legion was 5000-some odd men. Now, we don't know what size an Imperial legion is, but it's obviously fairly large given the emphasis the Emperor gave it.

So where are the rest of them?

We see maybe a handful of stormtroopers get killed, a few vehicles destroyed, and one group of a couple dozen or so captured.

What happened to the rest? Get lost in the woods? Or is an Imperial legion much smaller than a Roman one, and the Emperor was only emphasizing it because the size of a legion is still several times larger than the rebel force that could fit in the shuttle?

Begin FanWank:
In any case, as has been pointed out, the Ewoks didn't do it all alone. They were a diversionary force that gained a few lucky victories, some fairly believable, some not so much.

A plausible hypothesis is using them to funnel Imperials into killzones set up by the Rebel commandos that accompanied the main characters. Based on what we actually see of the battle, the Imperials were caught completely off-guard and their response and was disorganized to say the least. Their combat methodology was also piss-poor with no thought given to the environment. By contrast, the Ewoks were highly organized and well-prepared. The rebel commandos were also much better prepared for forest combat (lolcamouflage). In this situation it's easy to imagine commandos ambushing and slaughtering whole groups of stormtroopers.

But it still all hinges on how many troops the Empire had. No matter how badass a particular group of soldiers may be, no matter how many factors are in their favor, eventually they'll be overwhelmed by sheer weight of numbers. Woookieepedia gives the standard passenger capacity of a shuttle at 20. Since Han and Chewie were piloting, that leaves 18 seats for commandos. So 18 commandos against... how many stormtroopers?

Wookieepedia doesn't have a concrete answer. Naturally, since there isn't a canon source for it. It gives a range of 8000-15000.

So where the hell were they?

 

[ElPatron]

"Ok people we have a cloning technique that lets us create millions of perfect soldiers"

You do know that clones were rare in the original triology, right?

Most stormtroopers were conscripted, not perfect super-soldier clones. I'm not a big fan of Star Wars but I know that...

Humans in real life don't have ANY human cloning technology, or even lasers/blasters/siege machines like those in Star Wars universe.

What does that have anything to do with my post? I was only explaining why Storm Troopers are not as effective as Clones.

 

[Abedeus]

"Ok people we have a cloning technique that lets us create millions of perfect soldiers"

You do know that clones were rare in the original triology, right?

Most stormtroopers were conscripted, not perfect super-soldier clones. I'm not a big fan of Star Wars but I know that...

Humans in real life don't have ANY human cloning technology, or even lasers/blasters/siege machines like those in Star Wars universe.

What does that have anything to do with my post? I was only explaining why Storm Troopers are not as effective as Clones.

You are still defending the teddy bears.

YOUR LOGIC IS RIDDEN WITH FAULTS BY AD HOMINEM ARGUMENT.

 

[Sixcess]

That's all I have to say about Ewoks.

 

[ElPatron]

You are still defending the teddy bears.

YOUR LOGIC IS RIDDEN WITH FAULTS BY AD HOMINEM ARGUMENT.

IM NOT DEFENDING THE EWOKS, I AM MERELY EXPLAINING WHY STORMTROOPERS CAN'T HIT THE BROADEST SIDE OF A BARN FROM THE INSIDE.

 

[Abedeus]

You are still defending the teddy bears.

YOUR LOGIC IS RIDDEN WITH FAULTS BY AD HOMINEM ARGUMENT.

IM NOT DEFENDING THE EWOKS, I AM MERELY EXPLAINING WHY STORMTROOPERS CAN'T HIT THE BROADEST SIDE OF A BARN FROM THE INSIDE.

Plot armor.

 

[octafish]

Let's ask Tim about it shall we?

Hawk the Slayer is rubbish though.

 

[Mateusz Buniek]

http://www.facebook.com/we.hate.ewoks

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

True Story:

It was originally supposed to be the Wookies that the squad met, not the Ewoks, so the finale of ROTJ would have been an epic battle between hundreds of Wookies and Stormtroopers.
Lucas changed it because Ewoks were more marketable to children, and would sell better as merchandise. He also forfeited his fees in ROTJ and instead took 100% control of the merchandising, it's an incredibly smart business move, but his reliance on merchandise has been to the detriment of his films.

Very close, but you're wrong on one point: it was actually the first Star Wars that Lucas made sure he had exclusive merchandising rights to, and he didn't forfeit all of his other rights, he just requested that one in his contract knowing he'd get it, because movie merchandising really was not a big industry in the late 70's. He went on to make enough money on toys to personally fund the other five films, not to mention to buy back all the rights to A New Hope that he did give up (notably ownership of the film itself) back in '77.

Also, I think you're right about the real reason he changed the Wookiees to Ewoks, but Lucas has always maintained that it was because he wanted to do a story about a primitive people helping to defeat a high technology people, and we knew from Chewbacca that the Wookiees weren't exactly primitive. And to be fair to Lucas, the idea first showed up in the gigantic treatment he did for A New Hope, which was like 200 pages long and needed to be cut into three movies (although the final product barely resembled the treatment.) Basically, in that story, the heroes crash land on the Wookiee home planet and teach them how to fly fighter craft, and the final battle is pretty much Wookiees in X-Wings vs. the empire. So in that version, the Wookiees actually /were/ primitive, and the symbolism he claimed he wanted was intact.

Edit: And derp, I posted in a necro thread. Sorry about that.

 

[Squilookle]

Nothing wrong with necro posting if you've got something interesting to say, which you have.

 

[BathorysGraveland]

I didn't mind them as much as I thought I would (I just recently watched Star Wars for the first time, so I already knew some of what to expect), but I will admit the fight with the Stormtroopers was a tad silly. They're supposed to be highly trained, well equipped veteran soldiers after all.

 

[Ldude893]

OH MY GOD SHUT UP ALREADY okay heres the dealio the ewoks yes were made to be marcating jump but has anyone noticed these are the indians of star wars gosh there nothing wrong with that at all i have on of the biggest ewok hoardes of all time i know how the ewoks worked in with the story its as simple as they are the indians of star wars thankyou very much and thats it for me. p.s. DONT YOU DARE BASH ON ME FOR SAYING THIS.

...

Hate to break it to you, but there's only one person on the site we admire for using completely no punctuation and it's not you. For nearly all Escapists here, it just sounds silly, especially coupled with harassment against other members.

If you disagree with someone on this site, do it nicely and civilly. And always expect a response; this is an internet forum after all.

 

[fezgod]

I think people dislike the Ewoks because it was the first sign that Star Wars was becoming more child friendly and humorous.

A New Hope: Han Solo wastes some guy for trying to collect his debt, Ben Kenobi cuts a man's arm in a barfight and the camera briefly shows a bloody arm.

The Empire Strikes Back: the good guys lose, you rarely see that in child-friendly movies.

Return of the Jedi: adorable teddy bears defeat the Emperor's "finest troops" with sticks and rocks.

Plus, the whole scene really made the Empire seem comical and nonthreatening. In the first two movies, the stormtroopers are fairly competent, taking Tantive IV and Echo Base by slaughtering all resistance. The Imperial command was full of brutal commanders that wouldn't have looked out of place in a war film. By Jedi? Stormtroopers are tripping over simple traps.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

I think the whole "Ewoks are really the Viet Cong" is some half-baked BS concocted by Lucas to justify an otherwise unlikely scenario of the furry, cuddly forces of good owning the infinitely better prepared forces of evil.

 

[Jamieson 90]

Just to play devil's advocate, the Americans just like the stormtroopers had better equipment and training than the Vietminh and Vietcong in the Vietnam war, yet they still got owned, so it's not that unbelievable.

 

[Phuctifyno]

I think the whole "Ewoks are really the Viet Cong" is some half-baked BS concocted by Lucas to justify an otherwise unlikely scenario of the furry, cuddly forces of good owning the infinitely better prepared forces of evil.

Weeeellll, Lucas-BS or no, that is what actually happened.

Either way, unequipped and unlikely forces overthrowing the powerful and massive Empire is a thread that runs through the whole trilogy. That was also the whole point of the X-Wing strike in the first film. I've always seen the Ewok battle as taking that theme to its logical conclusion. It's the Empire's overconfidence and reliance on technology that gets them destroyed, and the idea that spirit and cunning can overcome those forces is the core concept of the Force and the Jedi. Of course it's unlikely. It's meant to be. As with most, if not all, fantasy.

Luminous beings are the Ewoks, not this crude matter.

 

[EWOKLOVER]

okay ldude im not harrassing anyone im simply stating the fact that ewoks are the indians of star wars