Your selection of movies confuses me. Those are the films from 2005, 1977, and 1980 respectively. Did you mean IV, V, and VI?
I’ve read that Lucas’s original plans for Star Wars was for there to be a land battle, between primitive Wookiees and high-tech Stormtroopers, on Yavin IV while the Rebel fighters attacked the Death Star, and that one big reason why it got cut was that he couldn’t afford a large number of Wookiee costumes. (I also suspect that this is a big reason why, in the trash compactor scene, Chewie never goes into the water – he was under an order to not get the suit wet. 
)
When the time came to produce Return of the Jedi (with another battle above a Death Star), he had the budget to do the land battle. But, by then, Lucas felt that he’d established Chewbacca (and, by extension, Wookiees) as a technologically-savvy species, and so, he created the Ewoks (short instead of tall, fuzzy instead of hairy).
Meaning: We’ve sold the shit out of the Wookie toys. Now we have to come up with something different to separate the mooks from their money.
Er, yes.
Thanks.
I don’t buy this. If “Making more money,” were the driving reason for the decisions George Lucas makes, why hasn’t he released the original trilogy on DVD and Blu-Ray? If the last two decades have proven anything, it’s that George Lucas is more than willing to ignore enormous pots of money if it means staying true to his artistic <ahem> “vision.”
I’m pretty sure we got Ewoks because George legitimately thought they’d be a good idea.
(Also, as a kid, I would have fucking killed for a wider range of Wookie action figures. This was not a necessary change in order to get my parent’s money. If anything, it would have been funneled into the respective pockets of Lucas and Hasbro at a vastly increased rate.)
In that case, no. There weren’t any funny aliens in the movies until Return of the Jedi. Yoda came off as one initially in Empire, of course, but that was a deliberate ruse.
By or of? :-p
Releasing the “original” versions would be acknowledging that he fucked everybody over with the “remastered” versions. George has his head too far up his ass to ever admit that he is oh so very wrong.
They have been released on DVD. A fairly halfassed nonanamorphic version, but they’re there. Not even a bloody “Episode IV” on the first movie, just Star Wars, nothing but Star Wars.
In a deleted scene from star wars IV: Biggs visits Luke from the academy and tells him that he’s joining the rebellion and he so goes through a few reasons as to why Luke should join him.
Wasn’t that basically just a special feature on one of the “Enhanced Edition” collectors sets, though?
And they didn’t sell very well, which I think justifies a lot of his reluctance about them. The truth is, the fanboys are a small percentage of potential sales, and most other people don’t give a monkey’s about the Special Edition changes or how lame the Prequels may be.
One of the things that’s amusing me about the SWTOR game that’s just come out now is that (a) the empire’s apparently been around a lot longer than (I’d have thought canonical) movies would claim, and (b) for at least 5000 years they (and the republic) have been inventing planet-killer weapons about every ten minutes. (The Jedi Knight story has you encountering about six of them, and I’m only about half done).
Or to use a real world analogy, it’s like a story where Britain responds to the IRA by nuking Belfast, and the Queen has dissolved Parliament while a character announces her intention to keep the local provinces in line with threats of nuclear annihilation. It’s probably safe to assume this version of Britain isn’t very nice or very democratic.
Every movie tyranny deserves a rebellion.
Or, even more on point, they’re Space Nazis. You don’t need an excuse to shoot Space Nazis. That’s what they’re there for.
That is one line I never understood. Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) says early on in the movie that she wants to “restore the republic”. But republics do not have royalty or princes or princesses! So if Leia was such an avid republican (note the lower case “r”) why did she not call herself simply Leia or Ms Leia?
It seems like while the Senate was a republic, every planet got to have their own government. So an individual planet might have royalty, but still send Senators.
Chewbacca seemed like comic relief to me. “I know it smells bad!”
The cantina full of silly aliens.
Leia was Princess of a planet, not of the whole Republic. Much like Queen Amidala.