The follow up to Caravan of Courage: An Ewoks Adventure improves upon the previous movie in every way, but for all the craft does still have the rough edges of a vintage made-for-TV movie.

(review and timestamps will be based on the Disney+ version of the film)

So Disney+ was on offer for a reduced price for one month recently and I took the bait. Knowing I was on the clock for a month (I am no longer interested in letting subscriptions linger unless I have a specific want), I got to some shows on the to-do list. After spending several days burning my way through Star Wars: The Clone Wars (which is a story for another time), I was left feeling a bit empty. Looking for my next fix, I started browsing and noticed the Star Wars Vintage Collection. The collection has real Island of Misfit Toys vibes. Here we have the non-canon, made-for-TV Star Wars works rounded up: the saturday morning cartoons Droids and Ewoks, a bizarre animated short titled The Story of the Faithful Wookie, the Genndy Tartakovsky Clone Wars short series, the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special, and finally, our Ewoks movies: Caravan of Courage: An Ewoks Adventure and Ewoks: The Battle for Endor.

I suppose we must recap Caravan of Courage, if only to give readers a point of comparison for Battle for Endor. Caravan was first broadcasted in 1984 and tells the tale of the Towani family, who’s star cruiser has crash-landed on the forest moon of Endor. Catarine and Jeremitt, the mother and father, are introduced to us briefly before a massive, troll-like creature barges into the scene and chases after them. We then meet the Ewoks and glimpse their village life before they eventually discover the son, Mace, and the daughter, Cindel, who have been hiding in the starship. The group gets to know each other, including Wicket, the Ewok who would be Leia’s furry companion in Return of the Jedi, and eventually embark on a quest together to find the missing parents. Our adventurers accrue magical items (???) to aid them in overcoming obstacles, find and rescue the parents, and vanquish the troll. Roll credits.

Unfortunately, Caravan is a real slog. The story takes a long time to get rolling and never manages to sustain momentum. I never warmed up to our de facto lead, Mace, as played by Eric Wilson. Aubree Miller as Cindel was probably a little too young to handle this much screen time. The special effects are uneven; there’s a moment where spiders attack our heroes and it rivals Star Trek: The Original Series for cringey creature effects. Maybe in another setting (indeed, like TOS) I would find that moment charming in a “perfect in its imperfections” sort of way, but my patience had already run out by then.

Thankfully, the only thing you might want to know from the first movie that Battle for Endor doesn’t tell you is that the Ewoks have learned a functional level of English (“Basic” in the Star Wars fiction) from Towani family, which is why they are able to speak it in Battle. You can skip the first movie safely.

Now, behind the scenes, a couple of things happened in the year since the first movie was released that worked in Battle’s favor. The first thing is that the writing and directing crew had an overhaul - Jim and Ken Wheat become the writers and the directors, in fact. It’s clear this is an upgrade almost immediately as you watch this film. The other thing that happened is that Aubree Miller, once again playing Cindel, had time to grow up a little bit. While this didn’t solve everything for her, performance-wise, I do think she was a little more tuned in this time.

Battle wastes little time kicking things off. Cindel finds her dad (played this time by Paul Gleason!) putting the finishing touches on their star cruiser, which is finally fixed. Wicket and Cindel chat about how they’re gonna miss each other and are very quickly interrupted when they hear the sounds of battle in the distance, and the pair charge toward the village to find it under attack by marauders. Cindel is able to find Mace, who is using his blaster to defend the village and their wounded mom. He tells Cindel to go find their dad, and we, the viewers, watch as his valiant effort ends in him and his mom being killed by a blaster cannon. Cindel returns to her dad in time to see him escape from the marauders, but get wounded in the process. He finds her, has one last heartfelt exchange with her, then makes a last stand, getting gunned down as Cindel attempts to escape. We are just under the ten minute mark of this film’s runtime and the narrative is at full steam.

I want to be clear here: while I found myself impressed with this film in many ways, this is still a made-for-TV movie and it often shows. Lighting is frequently dull on interior scenes and has clearly been sacrificed in favor of evenly-lit, easy-to-see sets to make sure the picture survived broadcast television. There are some special effects moments that have not stood the test of time. While Aubree Miller improved since the first movie, there are still moments where she looks lost on-screen. If you’re not willing to re-calibrate your expectations for a child actor, then this movie may be a non-starter for you. Viewers are not given a lot of opportunities to dwell on the weak points, however, as the movie efficiently introduces new characters, establishes new stakes, and delivers character development and motivations with few breaks. Yet it also keeps a cohesive, clean narrative structure, with no apparent jumps in chronology. The writer-directors and editors really put together a breezy package.

Let’s talk about some of the other main characters. I have not yet mentioned the villains, who we met in the first ten minutes. The leader of the marauders is Terak, played by Carel Struycken, whom you may know as Lurch in the Addams Family movies of the 90s. His right hand is the witch, Charal, played by Siân Phillips. Terak seems to misunderstand the power cell that he seized from the Towani’s star cruiser as some sort of magical vessel that may, with the correct ritual, imbue him with “the power of the stars.” Despite the powers Charal demonstrates, she is constantly in fear of Terak.

As with all the other actors buried under make-up or costumes, it can be hard to assess Struycken, but he shines in the scene where he tries to coerce Cindel into “using her magic” on the power cell. Terak simply indulges in condescending to her, even playing to the crowd that is the mob of underlings to his side.

I did not feel Phillips really got a lot of opportunities to stand out, except for the scene at 55:30, when Charal’s been imprisoned with Cindel. Nearly all of her meaningful dialog is with Terak, who steamrolls the Charal and scenes with his anger and bellowing.

Then we meet Teek, performed by Niki Botehlo. Teek is, according to Wookiepedia, a teek. They’re like if you took the concept of an Ewok and just turned all the knobs on its key characteristics up. We’ve made them smaller. Cuter. More rascally. It turns out, Teek leads Wicket and Cindel to the final protagonist we’ll meet: Noa, played by the immortal Wilford Brimley.

Noa’s an old man who’s been shipwrecked and without any other human companionship on Endor for most of his life. Honestly, it’s a peculiar performance, but I ended up on board. There’s an awkward scene at about 41:30 where Wicket and Cindel are sneaking around outside Noa’s cruiser, and Wicket triggers a rope trap that snatches him up and sounds an alarm. Out of the ship storms Noa, shouting about telling them not to come here and that it’s dangerous. That’s not the weird part. Immediately after letting Wicket down, he picks him up in sort of a strange hug? And then, holding him, shouts in his face, “ALL RIGHT, I'M SORRY, BUT YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE BEEN HERE!” I cannot watch this sequence without thinking about how it must have felt for Warwick Davis, an adult man, to be picked up by another adult man, held his own height off the ground, and then be shouted at from point blank range. Maybe Wilford is performing as someone whose capacity for human interaction has rusted over in his years of hermitage? I found it distracting regardless of intent. Brimley, in fairness, settles down immediately and spends the rest of the movie in the pocket. That pocket being folksy charm and kindness, as we see shortly.

There’s a crucial scene at about 43:50 minutes of runtime that is mostly between Cindel and Noa. Noa, having now fully dropped the bristly facade he previously had for Wicket and Cindel, finds himself in a quiet moment with the girl as she reckons with her family's deaths. This could have easily been where the movie came to a screeching halt for several minutes. Instead, Aubree does probably her best work in the movie and Wilford reciprocates. It’s a very sweet moment, it doesn’t overstay its welcome, and it turns out the song Cindel sings is going to be paid off momentarily. Full steam.

The rest of Battle of Endor is crisp and not interested in wasting anyone’s time. My final note is that the climactic battle calls back to Return of the Jedi's battle on Endor, for better or worse. Our Ewok friends shall win the day on the back of antics and mischief. I find it a little silly, but there’s at least one point in the battle where the levity wins me over. Noa kills a marauder with a blaster turret within his cruiser. He then shouts as he draws on another target, “You’ll not come around botherin’ me!” I love this line in this context. Lives are at stake, he’s just killed someone, and makes the kind of declaration you’d make while shoo-ing a stray cat from your porch with a broom.

Some of the action of this scene is bit dodgy, and this is where you reminded again that this is a production for television. The patience I did not have for Caravan’s weak points, however, is plentiful here. True to the nature of the rest of the movie, we move on and everything wraps up nicely enough.

I feel compelled to address the issue of canon and the lore before we wrap here. As mentioned earlier, this is no longer canon as of Disney’s takeover of Star Wars. I’m fine with this. In short, my feeling is this: they can never change that these works exist. I reject the idea that something having or not having the ‘canon’ tag bears much importance. It’s all fiction. Actually, a little piece of Battle for Endor has carried forward into the new canon. If you’ve seen it, think back to season one of The Mandolorian. Remember Kuiil’s (“I have spoken”) bi-pedal beasts of burden? Those were Blurrg, and they are the same beasts the marauders are seen riding around on in Battle. They were created for this movie and continue to make appearances to this day.

So it’s been a pleasure to rediscover Ewoks: The Battle for Endor. It could have very easily been another movie that uses it’s license and cute characters as a rickety crutch for an otherwise poor effort, as I feel Caravan of Courage did. Instead, they learned the right lessons and they followed a bad movie with a good movie, so long as you are willing to engage with it on it’s terms, production-wise. No longer canon according to the corporation that bought George Lucas’ vision, it nonetheless remains an easy watch; in some ways more so than many of the theatrical efforts Star Wars has had to offer.