Forgotten Star Wars Of The Past - Droids & Ewoks

Animated Star Wars has been running mostly continuously in one form or another for around fifteen years now. The 2D and CGI Clone Wars cartoons, Rebels, Resistance, Forces Of Destiny, various Lego-themed specials and series - if you want animated Star Wars, the choice is yours. Not so in the post-Return Of The Jedi Star Wars hinterlands of the 1980s. If you wanted Star Wars cartoons, you had to choices - Droids and Ewoks.

Droids
Or to give it its full title:- Star Wars: Droids – The Adventures of R2-D2 and C-3PO. Yep, the name says it all and that’s exactly what you’re getting. Set some time before A New Hope, this series follows the adventures of the two droids as they pass from owner to owner in the years before they ended up jumping into an escape pod headed for Tattooine. As he has done in pretty much anything Star Wars related that involves the character, Anthony Daniels once again reprised his role as C-3PO. The show only ran for thirteen episodes and a one-off special back in 1985.

Ewoks
Lasting slightly longer with two seasons clocking in at 26 episodes, the series follows the adventures of Wicket as played by Warwick Davies in Return Of The Jedi in the run up to that film. In fact, the series concludes with the Empire discovering Endor as a lead-in to them using it as their base of operations for the new Death Star. Unlike in the film, the Ewoks speak English for the most part with the occasional Ewokian outburst (“Beechawawa!”).

So why are these forgotten? They’ve been oddly brushed aside - a DVD release over ten years contained edited compilations of a selection of episodes but, in these days where you can find pretty everything released on DVD/BluRay, they’ve never been released in their entirety. They’re a bit of an oddity these days; something that doesn’t really fit in with the tone and style of any of the incarnations of current Star Wars (not jokey enough to match Lego Star Wars, not serious enough to match Clone Wars/Rebels/Resistance) .

In terms of desire for them to be forgotten, nothing will match our next choice. Something that George Lucas himself wishes that the entire world would forget. Unfortunately, because the internet, we just don’t wanna let them...