The Ewok Movie: Caravan of Courage (1984)

Quick note: I got pretty windy in this essay so if Gmail or whoever cuts off the end of the email, you can click the link to read the full thing on the Substack site. There’s a candy-corn spider, so it’s definitely worth your while.

So: what’s The Ewok Movie about? Some kids and some Ewoks take a long walk and fight a monster. That’s it, that’s the movie. All two hours of it. 

The Ewok Movie, renamed Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure, and its sequel, Surprisingly Violent Proto-Willow with Ewoks, are two made-for-tv films that were originally meant to be half an hour long, and at some point during production got stretched to fill two-hour slots. They are not good, as you or I, adults who have seen a lot of movies and probably like Star Wars pretty well, understand “goodness.”

But for anyone with a passing interest in Star Wars as a cultural phenomenon (and, honestly, the origins of Willow), they are curious artefacts of a very different time. The effects can kindly be called mediocre, the dialogue is dire, and hey, did I mention that they were conceived as half-hour shows and then dragged, kicking and screaming, into two-hour slots? There’s a lot of filler.

A note on today’s illustrations: I ran prompts through the Dall-E Mini AI rather than take screenshots because life is short.

“Ewok in the style of Disney animation”

The Ewok Adventure begins with an establishing shot of a very obviously painted moon* and the camera pans down over Muir Woods Endor while Burl Ives narrates about… stuff. Folksily. Readers of a certain age will know Burl Ives as the narrator of the Rankin & Bass stop-motion Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer Christmas special (another made-for-tv treat). Readers of a different age will know him primarily as a singer. Many readers will not know him at all. But, for 1984, I think he was a big get for this film

Two adults in very early/mid-80s Star Warsian getup are wandering through a foggy forest, shouting names. They enter a crashed ship. In our first example of the utterly dire dialogue this film will inflict on us, we get this expository exchange:

N.B. the dialogue will never improve.

Inside they find a child’s jacket and mention life monitors. The life monitors thing will only really matter briefly in the 2nd Ewok movie; they hardly even get much more of a mention in this one.

And then a monster crashes through the trees, by which I mean a dude in a rubber suit, filmed at slow speed to suggest large size, and we bang into the credits. Which are mostly played over matte paintings recreating the Ewok village from Return of the Jedi because this movie does not have the budget to recreate the actual Ewok village from Return of the Jedi. Which was mostly matte paintings!

Spoiler alert; this movie does not have the budget to do a lot of stuff.

Cut to some Ewoks – two parents are worried about their missing children too, oh the resonance. Wicket, Leia’s buddy from Jedi, (again played by Warwick Davis) is the non-missing kid. Wicket’s dad has built a flying machine (as seen in Jedi; does this suggest that this film takes place before Jedi?) and flies off to find his children, who are stranded on a cliff face. “Cute” Ewok chaos ensues. I guess they just abandon the glider? We don’t see it again till the second movie, anyway.

A note on the Ewok costumes: their faces don’t move** and their eyes don’t blink and it’s weird in Jedi too, but Jedi, as The Ewok Adventure will demonstrate, is filmed in such a way that you don’t notice it so much. Here, where we spend a LOT of time with the Ewoks, it’s deeply unsettling. But don’t worry; it’ll get unsettlinger!

The Wicket family finds the abandoned human ship on their way home and we meet Mace and Cindel, the two missing human children from the beginning. They’re back inside the ship now? Where were they before? The movie doesn’t care to answer this question. Mace is a young teenage man of 13 or 14, with an unfortunate haircut, and Cindel is a little girl of about four, with confusing hair of her own: it’s piled up on her head in curls, and is never taken down no matter how much time passes, and never falls down despite the fact that she only has her teenaged brother looking after her. What was the point was of giving Cindel such an elaborate hairstyle, beyond the fact that everyone in 1984 was apparently obsessed with giant heads of curls on children?

Mace storms in shooting and is easily disarmed. The Ewoks, sensibly, do not allow him to resume possession of his gun. Just take it for granted that he will whine about this a lot.Anyway, the Ewoks take the kids back to their (ground-level) village (where they raise… llamas?)  and Cindel and Wicket make friends.

These are kind of verging on ‘90s prom, but I’ll take ‘em.

Okay, so the parents have been kidnapped (but not eaten, we know, thanks to the life monitors) by a monster, and the kids have been saved by the Ewoks, and presumably will head out to save the parents, right? Great, let’s get going!

…Or not. This is a two-hour-long film. Buckle up, folks; we’ve got some filler in the pipeline!

Filler 1: Cindel gets sick immediately. The Ewoks treat her but run out of medicine and have to go get more. Wicket brings her a flower, which is just a… grocery store daisy. C’mon, film. Try harder?! LOL the film will not, in fact, try harder.

While “helping” the Ewoks get more medicine, Mace hears a noise and spots a cute little creature in a hole in a tree so, naturally, tries to grab it, with his bare hand, and immediately gets captured by some sort of tree-eel. C’mon, Mace. Don’t GRAB TINY CUTE ANIMALS even if they’re not attached to carnivorous tree-eels. The Ewoks save Mace.

Cindel recovers and plays with the Ewoks’ pet ferret. I note that the Ewoks don’t seem to know what ships are, and there are no storm trooper helmets anywhere, so I guess that this takes place before Return of the Jedi. But then, they also don’t try to eat anyone. Really, who knows. It genuinely doesn’t matter!

Mace calls the Ewoks “animals” and dude, they made medicine that saved your sister AND have been learning your language. Theoretically, Mace’s journey in this film is about growing up and taking responsibility and recognizing the humanity of others, I guess, but to be honest, I’m giving the film too much credit; Mace’s journey is “I don’t like Ewoks” to “Okay, I like Ewoks”. And then he dies. I mean, spoiler alert, but he dies at the beginning of the sequel.

Cut to a stop-motion wolf-thingie howling against the painted moon, crashing us into Filler 2. Mace grabs Cindel and they sneak away from the Ewoks in the dead of night; this will definitely go well. Mace steals his gun back. They immediately get lost. Mace builds a fire and Cindel tries to get him to talk about his feelings, which is the exact moment that the wolf-thingie attacks. Wow, the only articulation on the monster’s face is its jaws, which sort of open and close, a little. Still, compared to some effects still to come, this is the good stuff.

If I have to see it, you have to see it.

The Ewoks arrive to save the kids and defeat the monster, and find one of the kids’ parents’ life monitors tucked into its…. collar, I guess. Ah, Burl is back to explain that yes, the monster which abducted the parents is the “master of the beast”. Maces gets his gun taken away again.

One wonders why, if the monster and his monster dog live so far away, they came to the Ewok forest in the first place. Do they eat Ewoks? Why did the monster take the humans? Why does he keep them alive? We will never learn the answers to these, or many other, questions.

Back in the matte painting of the Ewok treetop village, the Ewok mystic in the big bird-skull hat (you know him/her from Jedi) does some Ewok magic to figure out where the monster is. We see the parents hanging in a wooden cage (the kids shout “Mom! Dad!” a few times so we know for sure who they are.) “It looks like the monster’s real big! Where is it? Where is it?” Mace yells. Cindel cries. Burl tells us that the parents are being held captive by the Gorax, which lives in a land “from which no Ewok has ever returned.” Naturally a load of Ewoks decide to help the kids rescue their parents.

“Don’t worry, mom and dad. We’re coming,” Mace heroically intones, in front of a matte painting. He’s probably clenching his fists, as one must during an heroic intonation, but I’m not going back to check.

Cut to: Ewoks loading supplies for the journey to the Gorax’s mountain. The Ewok mystic calls everyone into his/her tent and gives them crowns made of feathers and passes out sacred totems of legendary Ewok warriors past. Some have to be given to Ewoks they’ll meet along the way. Cindel gets a candle. Mace is given a rock.

This pisses Mace off, so he tosses the rock aside. Wicket picks it up.

I pause the film and discover that we still have 51 minutes of movie to get through.

Let’s gather the team! Our party passes by an Ewok with an axe, who chops a tree down and nearly ends everything. Alas, the tree misses. The other Ewoks chat with him (I feel safe in assuming it’s a he since the film makes it pretty clear that all the lady Ewoks stayed home). They give him a tooth and he joins the party. His costume is AWFUL. They did not try hard with this Ewok. Welcome to the party, Tin Woodswok.

LOL Mace still isn’t allowed to carry his own gun.

Time to collect another Ewok! Mace, of course, whines. It’s time to meet Gandalf the Ewok. BUT HARKEN, this is a LADY EWOK PRIESTESS. She makes the party take a test before she’ll join the caravan. She passes Mace a crystal and it turns into a lizard and he whines, of course. Cindel gives the lizard back, and it turns into a mouse. I… do not understand this test. Cindel asks Gandwok for help (was that the test?) and she agrees and we’re off, again, some more.

The prompt was “California hills in summer with ewoks” and the AI added wildflowers to the “California hills in summer” images I’d already asked for.

Next: Mace touches the surface of a little pond and then gets pulled into it. No reason is given for him to touch the water, like the film taking 30 seconds to establish that he’s thirsty, or the water being an unusual color or anything. The Ewoks rush to the rescue. This rescue takes a long time since no one can figure out how to pass the magical barrier that has spontaneously developed on the surface of the pond. Thankfully, Wicket has a magic stick from the bird-skull elder back home and thus Mace is saved again. Wonder what he’ll whine about now.

Oh, he actually says thanks. Look, character development!

More filler: the pony carrying Cindel and Wicket runs away, with Cindel on its back! But, no worries; Woodswok saves Cindel and everything is fine.

That night, Cindel is burning her candle in a tent while Mace gazes thoughtfully into the distance. A fairy appears. No, really, a little glowing ball of light that squeaks and flies and whistles zips past. Mace, who has not learned anything in this film, immediately tries to catch it. What could go wrong, etc.

What happens next is not 100% clear. The fairy dives into the ground, which then erupts with hundreds of fairies. Is there… a fairy burrow? Did the one fairy turn into a thousand fairies? Does the film care enough to explain? LOL no. So the fairies zip around, annoying the party, until Cindel brings her candle outside and Gandwok makes her set it down in the middle of A BUNCH OF DRY GRASS. Instead of lighting Endor on fire, the candle absorbs (?) all the fairies except one, which Mace decides to keep in his pocket.

Speaking of walking, it’s day, and we’re off. The party walks past another matte painting. Gorax really does seem to live far away, which again: why. That night, Wicket gives everyone snacks. Then the fairy zips around the tent for a while and everyone laughs. In a better film, this would be the poignant scene where the party spends one last night together, before the final battle where they’re definitely all going to die. In this movie, it is just more filler.

“1980s science-fiction matte painting” The matte paintings in this film do not look like this.

Onward to another matte painting. Now they’re in a desert “of acid pools and dry lakes.” Which doesn’t matter at all because we no longer need filler, I guess. I suppose we should be glad we’re spared a scene were Mace sticks his face into an acid pool, or whatever. Aaaannnnddd we finally arrive at Gorax’s mountain fortress. It is, you’ll be shocked to learn, a matte painting.

The party can’t figure out how to get inside. Gandwok tells Mace he has to use his rock. He admits he threw it away. But Wicket has it, yay! “It’s just a plain old stupid rock,” says the kid with a fairy in his breast pocket. Gandwok makes Mace shake the rock; he realizes it has something inside and throws it to the ground, where it cracks open to reveal an arrowhead. Mace puts the arrowhead on the ground and it spins, leading the way to the fortress’ entrance.  Which is behind a fairly obvious boulder. Mace asks for his gun so he can “blast it away” and, with a loud boom that will definitely not alert any parent-eating monsters to their presence, Mace finally gets to shoot something.

The party enters a cave. The Ewoks decide that the young Ewoks and Cindel should stay behind. The adults (and Mace) put on their feather crowns and head off.

And now for the very, very best part of the movie: they reach a chasm which is spanned by a “spider-web” made of rope. Literally, it’s just rope. They didn’t even try. Mace is like, yeah, I’m going to get on this, shake it, cross it, and nothing bad will happen. A large spider appears, by which I mean a papier-mache spider with KY jelly smeared on its mandibles is lowered toward him (it isn’t even a puppet! It has no points of articulation! It is just a papier-mache spider on a string!) and he flings it away; it screams as it falls. Meanwhile, the Ewoks left behind with Cindel do headstands.

Back on the web, a larger spider (with one entire point of articulation!) is lowered to “attack” the Ewoks. YOU CAN SEE THE STRINGS MOVING IT, FFS. Gandwok uses her magic to… hypnotise it? The Ewoks escape. The Tin Woksman cuts down the web and the spider falls into the abyss, also screaming. Wait, how are they going to get back across the chasm?

Literally couldn’t get the AI to create a spider that looks as fake as the spiders in this film. This is a rainbow spider made of sparkles.

Oh yay, THE SPIDER IS BACK. It somehow has climbed back up out of the chasm and found Cindel so Wicket fights it, Samwise-style, with a knife, and kills it. This, by the way, is what passes for foreshadowing in this movie: something happens, and then, a few minutes later, exactly the same thing happens again.

Mace and the Ewoks climb some stairs and FUCKING FINALLY here’s the Gorax, who we see gnawing a bone before he wanders over to the parents in their cage to… howl. Is he going to eat them? No, he’s just noising at them. An Ewok knocks over Gorax’s axe and distracts him so I guess it’s clobberin’ time. The Gorax immediately runs in the wrong direction.

Anyway, Mace and the ‘woks turn the Gorax’s axe into a catapult and fling Mace up to his parents’ cage. Pros: touching reunion! Cons: Mace being 20 feet off the ground now does not solve the problem of how they’re all going to get down. Someone has the bright idea of flinging an Ewok up with a rope, which hey, does actually solve that problem. Why didn’t Mace take a rope?

The Ewok in the red crown*** continues to distract the Gorax while the humans escape. I notice that the Gorax costume has at least one nipple. Imagine if the creature effects folks working on this film had used the time they spent crafting Gorax nipples to, I don’t know, make a slightly more convincing spider puppet? I should say something clever about the sunk cost fallacy but this film has sapped my will to live.

The parents are lowered to the ground just as Red Crown runs toward them, followed by the Gorax. He spots the party and chases them; the Tin Woksman chops at the Gorax’s toes with his axe. Everyone makes it to the chasm that was, initially, crossable thanks to a big spiderweb. Mace uses his fairy to distract the Gorax. The Gorax bangs on the cave walls to try to catch the fairy but knocks down some stalactites, which take out the Tin Woksman.

Remember how I was all “these Ewok costumes are actually weird and unsettling because the eyes don’t blink, but it’ll get unsettlinger”? While the Tin Woksman is dying in Mace’s arms, someone involved in the creature effects on this film did the best they could to show that he’s in bad shape by, like, creating clay “eyelids” to cover about three-quarters of the Ewok’s enormous, fake, unmoving eyes. It is so deeply unnerving.

What’s more unnerving than unmoving clay Ewok eyelids? how about three AI-generated sexy Ewok costumes? Happy Halloween!

Anyway, Tin Woksman dies. Mace is briefly sad but takes his axe. The fairy leads the Gorax to the chasm. If you’re like, “great; this film must be nearly over now”… well, buckle up. This movie still has 8 minutes to go. Eight minutes is a long time on Endor.

So the parents and the ‘Woks trip the Gorax and he… falls into the chasm? Nope! He just falls near it and then roars. Gandwok uses magic to drop a stalactite onto him, but he gets up again anyway. Mom grabs Mace’s beloved gun and shoots the Gorax in the shoulder and that seems to finally knock him over the edge. Emphasis on the seems to. Mace delivers the sad news about the Woksman: “He died for all of us.” Cindel and Wicket appear at the other side of the (uncrossable??) chasm. WHAT COULD GO WRONG.

The Gorax climbs up THAT side of the chasm and tries to eat the kids. Mace uses Woodwok’s axe to nail him and that, FINALLY, is the end of the Gorax. The party uses a rope that comes out of nowhere to swing across the chasm, and woot, everyone is reunited. The kid playing Mace tries so hard with his triumphant, climax-capping delivery, but to quote Harrison Ford, “you can type this shit, but you can’t say it.”

This is an Ewok movie, so it has to end with a party! Back at the Ewok village, Mace and Cindel’s father tells Wicket’s dad, “we are two very lucky fathers” and Wicket and Cindel say each other’s names, and then the mystic puts the white feather crown on Cindel’s head, and Burl sees us out by remind us that “courage, loyalty and love are the strongest forces in the universe.”

*I stuck an asterisk here but then got distracted and forgot whatever hilarious point I was going to drop into a footnote. It’s a really bad painting, however. Really, really, really bad.

** One of the Ewok actors delivers their lines in such a way that you can see that the teeth of the Ewok costume are attached to the lips. When the actor speaks, the teeth… move. Still not as unsettling as the eyelids.

***I genuinely have no idea which Ewok this is. Wicket’s dad, maybe?!

Candy-corn spiders, still more convincing than the spiders in this film.

Wow, that was a lot. Truly; Substack is telling me I’ve gone on too long! Which is amazing, because very little happened in this film. I mean, there was some basic plot stuff, but then there was so much filler, mostly poor Mace doing something dumb, or, occasionally, Cindel being imperilled.

I couldn’t dig up a lot of info about this film, so here’re some educated guesses. I suspect that the target audience for this film was primarily 13-year-old boys who loved Star Wars, aka Audience-Insert Mace. In the early 80s, before home video technology became widespread, people  (especially kids!) might have seen the films a few times but would have been most familiar with Star Wars through its merchandise, which… was primarily aimed at kids. A silly little Star Wars tv movie could be made on a shoestring budget and aired on TV for kids desperate to spend a little more time in a galaxy far, far away.

But why set this on Endor instead of, like, a Star Destroyer or something that would probably appeal to 13-year-old boys even more than the Ewok village? Speculating wildly, I would guess that the decision was made in part for budgetary reasons (few sets and no sound-stages necessary; they just set up cameras in the East Bay hills), in part to allow for some kid-friendly mysticism instead of a lot of shooting, and finally for broader (aka younger) appeal than just 13-year-old boys.

I would guess, however, that these decisions had the unintentional result of making the actual audience for The Ewok Adventure skew younger than 13, and possibly… female. After all, the second film is about Cindel – no, really, her parents and brother die immediately – and contains even more magic than this one, though there is also a derelict spaceship.

Monsters: (the?) Gorax, his dog-creature, two spiders. The tree-eel. Fairies, depending on your definition of monsters.

Mullets: Oh, the hair in this movie. Mace has an awful bowl-cut, his mother has a short perm, and Cindel has the most baffling hair (and a kicky little headband) of all. It’s all so very 80s.

Representation: the hero is a thirteen-year-old white dude (the actor, Eric Walker, was born in 1970, so he’d have been 13 or 14 during the filming). Cindel is regularly imperilled. There is a human mom, one female Ewok who goes on the adventure, and a female-presenting fairy. Everyone else is in a full-body costume. There are no people of colour.

Remake watch: LOL can you imagine.

“ewok caravan of courage” Yeah, I got lazy with this one but the effects are still better than in the actual film.