ABOUT EWOKS

As my devoted readers will know, I finished watching the Star Wars trilogy a few nights ago, an occasion that was incredibly momentous to say the least.
Now, a big part of the third Star Wars movie is the appearance of Ewoks--small, teddy bear-like creatures who live on the forest moon of Endor. They are very primitive and less advanced than Han Solo and his troop. In certain ways, their conceit could be characterized as racist--they are made to evoke various indigenous peoples at the advent of colonizers: they are easily persuaded, gullible, they worship new technology, etc. All this is no good.
Anyway, like perhaps many Star Wars watchers, I was at first quite amused by Ewoks. After all the ugly aliens in the movie, it was nice to see such cute and furry ones, and their eyes kind of look like they are made of chocolate (and I like chocolate). But as their role in the plot dragged, as they planned to burn Luke, etc. in a moment that could not have been less suspenseful, I began to wonder whether their presence wasn't a detriment to the movie. They are really not very creative characters, and their actions are pretty circumscribed by the lack of inventiveness with which they were created. The fact that they are made to be so "primitive" gets tiresome as you realize how literally the producer types have interpreted the concept, and also means that they are not particularly interesting to watch. After all, there is little a teddy bear can really do on a forest planet.
I am not the first to think about this. Ewoks have long been debated by Star Wars fans, and their great role in the last movie is greatly contested. It has even surfaced in pop culture. In an episode of Lost, one character begins scheming to get the creatures out of the movie (the circumstances of this are complicated), declaring quite simply "Ewoks suck." I suspect the comment is, to a certain extent, self-serving--at that point the Lost producers were pretty confident in how good they were at inventing science fiction things, and probably wanted to toot their own horns at small flaws in other works. But it also raises the question: would the movie be better without Ewoks?
It turns out, according to some shady Star Wars websites, that the plan was originally to have the heroes land on a Wookie island, and that many many Chewbaccas would help destroy the Empire. But the problem, according to some producer types, was that they wanted the empire's downfall to be instigated by creatures without the empire's vast resources in technology, and by this point, Chewbacca had been shown to be technologically competent. So, they invented some dumbed-down version of Wookies to take their places.
I think that everyone can agree that using Wookies would have been much better, and I don't really have to explain myself here. There were many ways that the producer types could have made it work. For one, we don't know if other Wookies beside Chewbacca are technologically competent, and with one line like Han Solo saying "I trained him a bunch" no one would have asked any questions. Also, it could be like another clan of Wookies that were not as educated as Chewbacca or something. Anyway MANY SOLUTIONS other than looking up Wookie in the alien thesaurus and finding the closest possible synonym creature.
All of this is to say, sometimes, when something works, you should just stick with it. I don't think that using the same creature in two different ways would have been a detriment to a series that had already shown its prowess at inventing things. No one, by the third film would have doubted that the producer types were good at making creatures, but the fact that they made such a lame excuse for a character at the end probably did raise some doubts.