So the 1985 Ewok TV show isn't great. There's definitely no foreshadowing here.
A Star Wars (retrospective) Story, Part 30
Happy 30th post. If you've not read a single one of the others, uh. Don't feel obligated to do so. These are largely standalone retrospectives. I will have a little interlude special for this series done soon.
I don't think this show is particularly good. It's not particularly good in terms of children's media. That said, I don't think this show is particularly bad in any way either. It's actually spectacularly mediocre in a way that I find difficult to discuss. And I LOVE 80s TV cheese. I live and BREATHE for 80s animated show cheese. Actually, hilariously, the origin story of this blog IS 80s TV cheese (Or well, a modern reboot of an 80s cheese TV show). 80s TV shows were... kind of nightmarish if you're watching them and seeking quality in any sense. They are the product of a largely deregulated TV industry. Which is the nice way of saying they are the product of an unchecked desire to sell toys to children (Say it with me everyone: Fuck Ronald Reagan).
George Lucas did have aspirations for this show to be Good though. The studio that did the animations in the Holiday Special (generally considered to be the only redeeming part of the damn thing) came back to do it and the Droids show (which I will be discussing soon) and the budgets were generally speaking pretty large, around 500000 dollars per episode. Today that'd be around 1500000 dollars in present day USD. Which again, is a per episode cost. The stories are episodic, they are largely contained from the rest of the Star Wars universe, and take a more children's adventure fantasy approach. My previous criticisms of this approach still apply. So now we have an Ewok show.
Or well. Two? Ewok shows?
Okay. So the thing is that the tale of Ewoks is actually the tale of two different TV shows in a trench coat. The first season and the second season are so separate from each other as to be considered effectively discrete. The first season has 24 minute episodes, storylines that last the duration of an episode, a pretty large cast, and an animation style that, though simplistic, is relatively impressive for what it is.
The second season of Ewoks has a reduced cast, storylines that last half the episode so you get effectively 2 stories in one 20+ minute episode, and, to my mind, art that is a little less interesting to look at along with stories that are somehow even simpler and more devoid of character than the first. I don't think it's bad, I just think it's notably less ambitious and as a consequence a little worse as a product. These two seasons look and feel very different from each other.
If you can't tell from this trajectory the reception to the first season was lukewarm. And Droids (the series we'll get to soon) was not well received. So naturally, Ewoks ended up canceled after 2 seasons. There are some highlights, the second-to-last episode of the series feels very much like a good children's Star Wars adventure (complete with sneaking into Imperial facilities disguised as droids), though it feels incredibly jarring to see Stormtroopers and Imperial infrastructure in this world. It's an inconsequential series, but fine. The seasons feel so distinct from each other because the show never really had an identity so much as recurring characters and an overall aesthetic.
Look, in an era dominated by the desire to sell toys above else Ewoks isn't particularly surprising in terms of its subject matter. I think the little snippets of the Ewok language they throw in are fun. Members of the production crew mentioned ABC tended to shoot down anything that felt too adult, too "Star Wars-y," which is... probably why it feels so divorced from everything. I think the animation is creditable given the amount of variety in backgrounds, the amount of work put in, and it reflects the budget.
Unfortunately it's just hard to care about this cartoon, because in the sea of children's advertisement masked as television, it's not very notable. It's an unambitious story and conceit. I almost wish they'd taken a bigger swing and missed than aimed for a very modest target.
Is it a sin to be forgettable? Is it a worse sin than being bad? I don't hate this show, but I'm unlikely to remember it. It is manufactured to be good, it was given a budget that would've been a dream for several other shows, it was manufactured to sell toys. There was a real desire for this show to exist and for this show to sell. There was effort and skill and lots of money put into it. They wanted this show to happen. It's Ewoks! Ewoks are popular, Star Wars is popular, we need to have an Ewok show!
But watching the show I cannot help but wonder whether anyone wanted to tell any story at all. They wanted this show to happen. They never thought about what they wanted to show. And this, this is a lesson they should have learned in the 1980s, long before streaming happened.
TL;DR: I'm going through all of the Star Wars media I can get my hands on in order of its initial publication. I shall discuss it all. Maybe someday I'll even finish it! CLICK HERE FOR THE MASTERPOST