Why no more Ewoks in Star Wars?


Aside from the two TV movies and the animated series, Star Wars has never revisited the Ewoks, not in the prequels, or the sequel trilogy, or the TV shows. Why haven't we seen them again?

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[deleted]

Well, Ewok is an anagram of woke. I'm sure there's a preachy story in that somewhere.

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Good spot

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Two movies and an animated series is already quite a lot of media attention.

I think there are three reasons. One is practical, one is strategic, and one is story-based.

Practically-speaking, there's only so much that can be done with short, furry tribal creatures. They got lucky plot armour to carry them through an ambush battle with traps, cunning, and a lot of Rebel allies. Take them out of that context, and what are they going to do that will work for the story? Including them would be convoluted or make stories bloated (or more bloated). There are only so many contexts in which they will work.

By "strategic," I mean from the perspective of the marketing guys on these movies. The Ewoks got maligned as being too cutesy, and the Disney era has been plagued by pandering. Fans spent a decade ripping on the Prequels, so The Force Awakens made sure to include plenty of nostalgia, but basically only for the OT (just as one example). Because the Ewok rep is low and the number of people who really would love to see them again is also not super-high, it makes no sense to bother trying to include them from a marketing perspective. They spend billions of dollars making this stuff; they don't want the risk.

Finally, there's the story-based reason. Ewoks don't have ships or tech. They aren't "important" in the way that certain planets, races, factions, or persons are in the Star Wars universe - at least, thusfar and as-shown. So, from a story perspective, it's hard to justify why an Ewok would be anywhere but Endor's forest moon. It's hard to justify heading back to that forest on that moon and finding the tribe (or another tribe) again. They go back to the Endor system in TROS, but I honestly can't recall if they are meant to be on the same moon. Even if they were, fans didn't want to see Ewoks (see rule 2) and it was already an overstuffed movie (see rule 1). So why bother?

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They have an Ewok in the last film of the newest trilogy.

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there was also a unfinished short film called return of the ewok

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