Star Wars: Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure (1984)
Disney didn’t invent the idea of Star Wars spin-off films. Long before Rogue One and Solo, Lucas realized that the universe he had created was ripe for stories that would explore other corners of the universe and the supporting characters people had grown to love. After Return of the Jedi no supporting characters were as beloved, or divisive, as the Ewoks, those furry, teddy bear-like heroes of the Battle of Endor. While they were accused by some of being merely cynical cash-ins to generate kid-appeal, and seen as juvenile (echoes of later criticisms of Jar Jar Binks abound), the Ewoks were hugely popular among the young fans of the series and the populace as a whole. When the opportunity for further Star Wars spin-offs arose after Return of the Jedi, it was the Ewoks—and the Droids, R2-D2 and C-3PO, in their 1985 animated show—characters that lent themselves to humourous and child-friendly themes that were developed. The Ewoks would become the subject of two made-for-TV movies and a two-season animated television show, but the first of these spin-off projects was The Ewok Adventure, later re-titled Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure.
Caravan of Courage debuted on ABC for their Sunday night movie of the week on November 25, 1984. Given the disastrous reputation of the previous Star Wars Holiday Special in 1978, Lucas maintained a bit more control of the film, imagining a story with his children’s nanny, Bob Carrou, and handing direction to John Korty, who had directed the first Lucasfilm-produced animated project, Twice Upon a Time. Expanded from its original conception as a 30-minute special to fill the movie of the week slot that ABC desired, Caravan of Courage was low-budget and seen as a place for ILM to experiment with low-cost visual effects, especially stop-motion and matte painting. The Ewok projects would be some of the last times ILM would work in a non-digital medium. As Joe Johnston reflects in the book, The Cinema of George Lucas: “The effects we did were pretty primitive. We did forced perspectives and glass paintings, back-to-basics things that had been around since the 1920s. George just told us to go out there and have some fun.”
The reality is that the film’s meagre budget shows. The visual effects are obvious and badly integrated with the live-action footage shot a few miles from Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch in Marin County, California. However, the effects are not entirely without their charms. The stop-motion has a Harryhausen-esque surrealism and the matte paintings, some reused from Return of the Jedi, are lovely in their imagery if not in their effectiveness in selling the reality of Endor.
Perhaps the biggest problem with the film is that following on the heels of Return of the Jedi, a film that has perhaps the very best non-digital special effects of all time, Caravan of Courage looks even more cheap and uninspiring. Even if it isn’t out of place for a mid-80s television movie, the title “A Lucasfilm Production” and the tangential Star Wars connection leads a viewer to expect a lot more.
It is this connection to the Star Wars universe that is both the film’s greatest asset and weakness. The Ewoks, whatever one thinks of them, were undoubtedly a popular creation, especially with small children. The idea of a film telling further stories amongst Endor’s forests was not a bad one. Lucas even had Warwick Davis return to play the role of Wicket, the young Ewok from Return of the Jedi who befriends Princess Leia, and other Ewok characters, including the medicine man, Logray, return as well. And as cheap as the film is and as bad as some of the visual effects end up being, the film manages to maintain some stylistic and formal continuity with Return of the Jedi, bringing in Johnston to do the designs and following a fairly coherent and classical filmmaking method of medium shots and continuity editing. It’s not entirely incoherent on a formal level, as some television (and even theatrical feature) movies are. The filmmakers clearly understand the effect they want to achieve, and what was popular and worked at the time. For instance, the opening scenes of the family searching the dark forest with flashlights recall the opening of Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and later scenes show traces of ideas Lucas would explore to marginally more success in Willow a couple years later.
Yet, the film makes no sense in terms of how it fits into the established Star Wars universe and timeline. Ostensibly set in the time between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi (according to official sources), this is impossible as the film features Wicket learning “Basic” (i.e. English). If the Ewoks had encountered humans before, why would they be wary and afraid of Luke and company in Return of the Jedi or want to eat them? If the film takes place afterwards, wouldn’t there be some evidence of The Battle of Endor? Wouldn’t the New Republic have maintained some way of staying in contact with their key allies who helped deliver the battle? The inescapable conclusion is that this story doesn’t really fit into the Star Wars “canon,” no matter how it is established.
Caravan of Courage, while set in the Star Wars universe (the family has a space cruiser and blaster-rifles), also ramps up the fantasy elements of the series. The Ewoks possess real magic and their tribal rituals are shown to be effective in power. When taken together with its narrative structure, the film is very much a fairytale by design. The film utilizes a narration that also adds to its holiday fable feel, delivered by Burl Ives, who most will recognize as the narrator of the classic Rankin/Bass Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer holiday special! It’s a strange effect, but Ives’ gentle recounting of the film’s narration also lends it a strange feeling of a nature documentary at times. Furthermore, the film utilizes real-life Earth animals, including llamas, ponies, lizards, and ferrets, in order to save on visual effects. But the effect is a strange blurring of the film’s setting and genre.
The story itself is simple, episodic, and lacking in the kind of narrative sophistication that characterizes the later Star Wars episodes. What this means is that events in the story are often driven more by set pieces and characters the story needs to introduce than they are by furthering the story or introducing real complications or setbacks. One instance is a very silly scene in which the human boy, Mace (Eric Walker), sticks his arm in a hole in a tree to grab a furry creature only to be attacked by a long worm thing. It lacks motivation or believability, and seems only there to add some kind of danger in the moment. The Ewoks handily rescue him, but the event has no lasting impact on Mace or his ability to function in the story. Production notes on the film suggest that the hole in the tree was originally meant to be a large flower that would prove to be carnivorous (think a giant Venus Fly-Trap), but that was too difficult to realize in production. Like many strange ideas in the film, the remnant of an originally-decent idea in implementation seems out of place and haphazard in the finished product
The film follows a family of humans, the Towanis, who crash on the forest moon, only for the parents to be abducted by a giant creature called a Gorax. The children, the aforementioned Mace and a little girl, Cindel (Aubree Miller), encounter the Ewoks, earn their trust, and venture on a journey to the Gorax, collecting a caravan of helpers along the way. It’s a classic fairytale journey, basically another variation on the ancient Chinese legend, Journey to the West, in which the heroes encounter various figures along the way who join their quest or add their special relics to aid in the journey. For instance, the caravan must recruit the Ewok priestess, Kaink, passing her test before she will join them (Mace, predictably fails, and only the purity of little Cindel endures). The characters also gain various sacred tokens of the Ewoks; Cindel’s is the Candle of Pure Light, which becomes essential in gathering the assistance of the Wisties, small fairy-like creatures realized through animation.
Delving further into the Ewok culture and practices, the latent orientalism of Return of the Jedi is magnified. What works in small doses (generically, the Ewoks function as an example of the “noble savage” character from old adventure films), here teeters on comical and offensive. For instance, Mace initially rejects the idea that the Ewoks are even sentient beings, calling them animals despite their obvious cultural and technological developments. The film’s interest in Ewok culture is essential to the film though: without it, the film lacks any real reason to exist.
Of course, the film ends on a similar note to Return of the Jedi, with the heroes reuniting kids with their parents and playing music in the Ewok village. It’s really aimed at very small children in its simplicity, though some may find elements off-putting (I recall the Gorax and some of the creatures being frightening as a small child). Still, upon its initial release it was fairly well received, even nabbing Emmy-nominations for "Outstanding Children's Programming" and "Outstanding Special Visual Effects.”
Sadly, when considered outside of the limitations of its time and budget, Caravan of Courage is not a good film in the final tally. Its weaknesses and technical limitations keep it from really being interesting to any but the smallest children or die-hard Star Wars completists (like us). The Ewok angle gives it more interest than it would otherwise have, but the performances, especially from the human characters, are painful. Eric Walker as Mace is whiny and useless, seemingly drawing on the most off-putting elements of Mark Hamill’s Luke Skywalker from A New Hope and none of his idealism or charm. Cindel is cute—her character recalls Drew Barrymore’s Gertie from E.T. in appearance and conception, but Miller lacks the assuredness and talent that Barrymore brings to Spielberg’s film. Perhaps that’s unfair, as Miller was a first-time actor from Marin County; it should be said she’s by far the most empathetic human character in the film, far more than her brother or parents. It’s no surprise that the film’s sequel, The Battle for Endor, would jettison those characters in favour of featuring more Cindel.
Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure shows that not everything Lucas did with Star Wars turned to gold. It’s ultimately a failure, but a noble one. It’s an example of experimentation and freedom, play and ostensible child-like fun, even if those experiments fail and it never really deliver on the promises of its concept. Something like this would never be made today: in the age of Disney, IP is protected too tightly. Brands need to be secured, and if there are failures, they are failures of imagination, not experimentation and a lack of concern for the IP. Later Ewok stories, both the live-action sequel and animated series, would be more successful, but Caravan of Courage ends up somewhere between the atrocity that was the Holiday Special and the more successful freewheeling expansion of the Star Wars universe in later Expanded Universe and Star Wars stories.
4 out of 10
Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure (USA, 1984)
Directed by John Korty; screenplay by Bob Carrou, based on a story by George Lucas; starring Warwick Davis, Eric Walker, Aubree Miller, Fionnula Flanagan, Guy Boyd, Burl Ives.