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Few films have been studied as closely as George Lucas’ 1977 sci-fi epic “Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope,” and most fans of the film already know every tiny detail about the movie’s production. Many of them have likely watched the 2004 documentary film “Empire of Dreams: The Story of the Star Wars Trilogy” or read J.W. Rinzler’s 2007 book “The Making of Star Wars: The Definitive Story Behind the Original Film,” the latter of which explores just how different Lucas’ initial “Star Wars” script drafts were when he was still writing the film in the mid-1970s. For one, there was once a character named Annikin Starkiller, while Han Solo was a fish-like, green-skinned alien with gills. Similarly, the fussy droid C-3PO, eventually played by Anthony Daniels, was once meant to be more like a sleazy used car salesman. These facts are all well-known parts of behind-the-scenes “Star Wars” lore.
Of course, the “Star Wars” we got became one of the largest marks on American popular culture, so much so that it’s hard to imagine Lucas’ film coming out any differently than it did. Mark Hamill is Luke Skywalker, Harrison Ford is Han Solo, and so forth.
Some might even know about Lucas’ plans to place Luke on the Wookiee home world, where he would fight a Wookiee chieftain and become a prince in Wookie society (as Lucas revealed in a 1977 interview with Rolling Stone). He would then lead a Wookiee raid on an Imperial base. Wookiees, of course, are the species whose ranks include everyone’s favorite “walking carpet” Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew), and a lot of Lucas’ early ideas for them were ultimately reworked into Ewok society for 1983’s “Star Wars: Episode VI — Return of the Jedi.”
George Lucas once made Luke Skywalker an honorary Wookiee prince
Paul Scanlon, the Rolling Stone interviewer, noted that “Star Wars” has a wonderful “lived-in” quality to it that’s absent from other sci-fi stories. There’s no analysis of Jawa society, for instance; instead, viewers just have to accept that the small, hooded critters live the way they do. Scanlon assumed, though, that George Lucas had considered all of the necessary anthropological details and asked what kind of society, say, Wookiees might have. What does the Wookiee homeworld look like? Lucas responded by saying that he had indeed intended for Luke Skywalker to visit the Wookiee home planet originally:
“That’s in the earlier scripts. I had actually written four different plots and different stories with different characters, and they involved different environments. In one of the scripts, there is a Wookiee planet. It’s a jungle planet, and there was a whole sequence where the Empire had a little outpost on the Wookiee planet, and Luke gets involved with the Wookiees, and he fights the head Wookiee. He wins the fight, but he doesn’t kill the Wookiee, and the Wookiee says, ‘Okay, you are going to be the son of the chief,’ and all that kind of stuff. He rallies the Wookiees and the Wookiees all attack this Imperial base.”
One can see the echoes of the above ideas in “Return of the Jedi.” In that film, Luke uses his Force abilities to make it look like C-3PO is a deity who can float in the air to the primitive, teddy bear-like Ewoks (whose own language was inspired by a Mongolian tribeswoman). The Ewoks then join Luke and his friends to fight the Empire. Clearly, Lucas was still keen on certain scenarios by the time that film entered development.
George Lucas had a good idea for Wookiee society in 1977
George Lucas also noted that he had been thinking about Wookiee society a little bit, in addition to featuring them in his script. He added that Wookiees even played a key role in the climax of “Star Wars” at one point:
“The Imperial base has tanks and all kinds of stuff, and the Wookiees beat them off, and then Luke and Ben and Han and a bunch of people train the Wookiees to fly the fighters. And it is the Wookiees that go after the Death Star, not the Rebels that were on the planet. It was a much different thing, there was a very involved thing with the Wookiees. The Wookiees are … slightly primitive, they live in the jungle, and there is a great sequence (which may end up in one of the movies) where there is a giant fire and they are all dancing around the fire, all the drums are going and all that kind of stuff.”
The dancing Wookiees sequence is yet another element that wound up being retrofitted to the Ewoks in “Return of the Jedi.” Eventually, though, Lucas included a scene set on the Wookiees’ home world of Kashyyyk in 2005’s “Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith.”
Weirdly enough, the Wookiees and Kashyyyk’s most prominent on screen appearance to date arguably came with 1978’s notoriously terrible “The Star Wars Holiday Special.” The special takes place almost entirely on Kashyyyk and involves a Wookiee holiday known as Life Day. It also reveals that Wookiees apparently have access to television, holograms, and V.R. entertainment. The whole thing is truly mind-boggling.
