CaptainYossarian posted:

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I've never really understood why people have such a hard time accepting the Ewoks either. It's said that the Ewoks are 'too cute' but that's just a matter of perception. The Humans in the story thought that they were just little teddy bears as well. When they're captured, Luke and co have a good chuckle when they see the Ewoks. The story is told from the point of view of the Humans. They don't find the Ewoks very menacing, so neither do you, the viewer. However, that's before they've actually done anything to prove themselves.

On the other hand, the Ewoks think of themselves as pretty tough, not at all how outsiders view them. They see themselves as a proud warrior culture with mastery over their habitat. They have no fear of the rebels and fully expect them to accept that they've been captured. They then intend on cooking and eating them. Note also that the Empire did not see the Ewoks as a threat since they were too primitive. I think their overconfidence might have been their weakness there.

So the Ewoks may look like simple creatures according to how Humans think but they have many decent qualities. They join together with those the rebels who've proved themselves to be honourable to defeat a larger enemy. They could have easily told the rebels to get lost and then hidden in the woods until the fighting was over but they didn't. They went up against an enemy they knew was vastly more powerful and technologically advanced just to give their new allies a chance to put their plan into action.

Ewoks are intelligent enough to use what they have around them to come up with some decent weapons. Building gliders, catapults and traps big enough to destroy and AT-ST seems quite impressive to me. The Ewoks don't actually defeat the Imperials either. They take them by surprise and then keep them occupied for a while. They know the terrain and they have tenacity and spirit - they were fighting for their homeland which is why they threw themselves into battle. So yes, on a few occasions they manage to batter a few stormtroopers but there's also quite a bit of the Ewoks losing as well. Their gliders get shot down, their catapults get shot up and some of them get killed (and chucked in the bushes). Many more Ewoks must have been killed than are shown on screen since the Empire did have superior firepower. That is implied but seeing it would be right downer. However, it's largely a function of the story that the Ewoks are shown to win against the Empire as much as they do. Ultimately they're going to win because they're with the good guys so it makes sense to actually show them being effective against the Imperials sometimes, especially as the tide of battle turns.

If the Endor battle was just shot after shot of the stormtroopers mullering the Ewoks then the viewer might wonder how they managed to keep the Empire occupied long enough for the rebels to get in the bunker, or why the Empire bothered to fight the Ewoks at all when they knew what the rebels were trying to do. If Ewoks are so rubbish, and the Empire knew they were rubbish, why did they leave the area around the bunker to go and fight them? Ewoks are also effective fighters because they were small enough to hide and they were better camouflaged. If a squad of stormtroopers chased after some Ewoks who distracted them then other, unseen Ewoks could attack them from behind. It's also true that the Imperials had to fight two enemies - the Ewoks and the rebels. So if they concentrated on attacking the rebels (the greater threat) they left themselves open to attack from Ewoks. Some of the Imperials went to take care of the Ewoks to stop them attacking those who were battling the rebels. That was a flaw in the Imperial plan. If all the stormtroopers had concentrated on fighting the rebels then they would have had sufficient numbers to defend against the less dangerous Ewoks as well. The Ewoks drew the Imperials into spreading themselves too thinly though and that is how they managed to keep them occupied for so long. It seems as though it was Imperial pride and face-saving that led them to hunt down the Ewoks who'd dared to attack them rather than regrouping to defend their base.

Stormtroopers dressed in white in a forest was also not a good move by the Empire. It seems they did not envisage ever taking on opponents in the forest itself and merely planned to defend their base and the area around it, since they had discounted all the local species as threats. So they never even bothered with camouflage. We also know that perhaps stormtrooper armour is not all that effective, helmets being difficult to see out of for instance which may have been exacerbated in forest conditions. The troops might also have been unfamiliar with fighting in such an environment. And it is true that there was a decline in trooper effectiveness since the Clone Wars. Those troops made by the Empire were never as good as the original Jango clones due to both the lesser training methods and the inferior genetic templates used to create a lot of the OT troops. So the Imperials had their own disadvantages to deal with.

All in all, I think the Ewoks did as well as they did because they were the better team on the day. The Empire thought they had it covered as far as Endor was concerned but the local boys gave them a run for their money. Editorially the Ewoks have to be shown winning at some point because that's what the audience wants to see, particularly younger viewers. The Ewoks wanted rid of the Imperials but they couldn't do it alone because they knew they'd lose in a straight fight. However, allied with the rebels they managed to put up a pretty good fight which served its purpose in keeping the Imperials occupied.

So Ewoks may look funny by Human standards and not worth bothering about. However, I also seem to remember a crazy little annoying frog creature that lived in a swamp and talked funny. He turned out OK in the end though. There's also that other famous bloke who was only little but he killed a giant with a pebble. What was his name? Dave something or other. There seems to be a rather obvious upfront message in ROTJ and it's probably something like "don't judge by appearances only" or to judge others by their actions or the content of their characters. You know, something like that maybe.

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