Lit Ewoks animated TV series and Movies (80's) and Clone Wars Micro Series coming to DisneyPlus

News today keeps confirming.

 

I wonder why Droids wasn't released.

 

Isn’t there a droid-focused spinoff coming up soon? Maybe the old show will be released when that spinoff comes closer.

 

I am happy that they will release CW on D+. It's hard to get a HQ non-english version of that show nowadays.

 

I would expect the droids episodes to be re-released after the others because of the known problems with archiving some of the episodes. Episode 9 never got a VHS release but of course you can track it down in different ways.

 

Okay, not to be the "do you have a source on that?" guy, but the bit about Lucas and the Ewok movies sounds VERY interesting. Where did you hear that?
And "barely canon"? With how often they were referenced in Legends I wouldn't call them that. We've also seen a few nods to them here and there in the current canon, most notably the Gorax in a Forces of Destiny episode.

As for my personal thoughts, I'm very excited as someone who's been working on Supernatural Encounters. With how many elements from the Ewoks cartoon feature in that story, it'll be very cool to see more casual fans get an idea of what the fuss is all about.

 

Unfortunately my direct source was a tweet from Pablo Hidalgo back in 2016 or so, and he’s deleted all his tweets on multiple occasions since then. But! The announcement of the reboot does explicitly state that Episodes I-VI and TCW were what Lucas considered his canon. According to the production notes for the Ewok movies on Wookieepedia and Wikipedia, it appears GL’s involvement with both films was fairly limited despite being the “executive producer,” and he has said the CW microseries was only a “pilot” or “test run” for the 2008 series.

https://www.starwars.com/news/the-legendary-star-wars-expanded-universe-turns-a-new-page

I mainly meant to suggest the Ewok movies/cartoon were marginal to the EU; aside from roleplaying articles, and Cindel’s appearance in the Black Fleet Crisis, they’ve mostly been treated as in-universe children’s entertainment (in Legacy of the Force: Fury, for example). Iirc Supernatural Encounters takes that approach too, but Joe loves the Ewok stuff (as do I haha) so on the whole it’s much more respectful towards it than most EU works. I was so excited when the Wisties appeared in the new(est) Battlefront II, of all places.

 

I thought the Shadows of Endor comic did a good job synthesizing the Ewok EU with regular continuity.

 

My reading of George's involvement in the Ewok films suggests it was substantial: on the first film he actually directed reshoots, edited portions of it, and oversaw post-production. On the second he was involved in pre-production, visited the set frequently, and edited parts of it. On both films he received a "Story By" writing credit. He may have distanced himself from them in the intervening years, but it seems to me that George was pretty invested at the time.

 

Fair enough, I’ve only done minimal research on their production. With that being said, he still didn’t consider them canonical by the time of the Disney acquisition

 

Hope we see Detours

 

There's an entire leaked episode on youtube.

 

A whole new generation is about to be traumatized by the first ten minutes of The Battle For Endor.

 

Oh I know I hope we see all the 30+ episodes they completed

 

I doubt it, but it could happen.

 

were even getting an Ewoks story in Life Day Treasury so canon is totally not shying away from them

 

I only saw both those films only once and there is no way in hell would I ever want to do it to myself again.

 

I've seen each three times, once in the 90s on VHS and twice on Youtube. It'd be great to see them in high quality for once.

 

I saw both when they were on TV in the 1980s (yeah, I'm that old) and had a VHS tape of Battle for Endor for a while that I hit up now and again. Sometime in the 2000s I picked up both films on a "flipper" type DVD that I've only rarely watched, probably because flippers really aggravate me (it always ends up on the side I don't want). I'm incredibly excited to have good quality versions of these that I can just watch whenever. It will be interesting to see what kind of remastering work, if any, has been performed on them.

 

I'm not too sure that these re-releases of the movies will be any higher quality than existing releases.

If they were recorded directly onto the TV master tapes and never onto film, the current 480i is the best quality there is or ever will be (AI upscaling aside, which can be rather iffy).

If they were filmed and edited on physical film stock (which I think they were), they could be re-scanned at a higher resolution. However, I think it's pretty likely that the physical film has degraded over the last 35 years to the point where restoring and scanning it would be very expensive; so much so and on such a relatively unimportant project that they might just go with the broadcast tapes anyways.

As for the Ewoks/Droids animated shows, those almost certainly only exist as 480i broadcast tapes.

Those damn things drive me insane.

 

I admit I'm really really curious about this. Side note / full disclosure, long ago I worked at a storage facility that had some broadcast elements for the Holiday Special... the salient thing being that I do know a bit about those types of elements. I'm pretty sure all these shows predate the use of video compositing for anything other than titles (thank god) so the possibility of complete film elements is out there. It's hard to believe they'd commit to putting them up at those old DVD standards, but Disney+ does have some pretty sketchy-looking old animated series like that (may have stumbled across "Spider-Man & His Amazing Friends" the other day... man did we have low standards when it came to Saturday morning cartoons!)

 

I agree with that, although I'm not sure they'd be worth the effort of restoring today. When the original OT negatives were inspected in 94/95 to begin work on the special editions, they were in terrible shape. Some sections were completely irrecoverable, and had to be taken from other intermediate negatives. Everything had been done right with the film (stored underground in complete darkness with exact humidity and temperature control), yet still they were a mess thanks to the propensity of film stock from that era to fade and decay rapidly.

The Ewok film elements themselves have been sitting around for about 35 years now, compared to the approx. 15 of the OT at the time. Additionally, the OT had intermediate copies of the original negatives made in 85, which were in decent condition and used to source irrecoverable shots.

I don't think any later film copies of the Ewok films would've been made, since as a TV movie it would've gone directly onto the tapes (which I'm pretty sure were also the sources for the VHS and DVD releases), and there was never a theatrical re-release after its short original run, which would've necessitated the original negative being copied.

In conclusion, I think that restoring the physical films for scanning would be an incredibly complex and expensive task, if it is even physically possible, due to the age of the negatives and the likely lack of more recent copies to source from. I don't think that there is much incentive at all to try and go through this process, especially since they probably still have the digital files from the DVD release that could be upload to D+ with relative ease.

 

This feels like something for @Ewok Poet

 

Yeah, you're probably right about most if not all of that, but they're gonna look like butt. Which, as I mentioned, is the case for some vintage Marvel cartoons on D+ but seems just a little low-rent for Star Wars... I guess I'm a SW snob, though. The other question about the digital files is that since the DVDs didn't feature all the material, do they have to go back to the source tapes anyway, for the non-DVD material? Would they redo and at least moderately up-res all of them anyway while they're at it? It'll be interesting no matter what. I mean, for nerds like me (us).

 

The sericels have been sold through the fanclub, right?

The other have been bought by various companies that sold them further as collectables. I have about two dozen of cels in this very room.

That's all I know. And those cels are splendid.

I have an odd theory about this. 15-year-old Auren Yomm in the last arc ends up in a relationship with a 30-ish year old Mungo Baobab. How is this stuff usually solved? Given that Disney princesses were probably super-young themselves...