While promoting his new Disney+ series, Willow, which brings back a beloved character he first played in the 1980s, star Warwick Davis was asked about another beloved character of his from that era, Return of the Jedi’s Wicket the Ewok. Specifically: mockumentary Return of the Ewok, shot behind the scenes of the Star Wars film and never officially completed nor released.
Speaking to Uproxx, Davis sounded enthusiastic about the idea of finally releasing the doc. Shot by Jedi assistant director David Tomblin, it follows the actor as a young teen, playing a fictionalized version of himself as he gets into character, and was apparently intended to be used for promotional purposes — sort of a precursor to the Blu-ray extras we’re so used to seeing today. But Davis also cautioned that it’s not as simple as him asking Lucasfilm to dig the footage out of storage and slapping it on Disney+.
“I think the challenge with Return of the Ewok is that so many people gave their time, there are these wonderful cameos in there, crew gave time during lunch hours to make it, and nobody ever signed off on their involvement,” he told Uproxx. “So, for some kind of lawyer, it’d be a massive amount of work to get everyone signed off so that we could actually use it commercially, I suppose.”
Still, Davis sounds wistful at the possibility. “I wrote an autobiography, and in that book I put little screenshots from the film, Return of the Ewok, as like a comic book kind of thing, telling the story for people who haven’t seen it,” he said. “But it really is one of those found in the attic kind of creations, isn’t it, in its very raw form? There’s unfinished sound, the print is very rough, but I think that’s one of the charms of it, really.”
As with all things Star Wars, at least, we can always have hope. Willow’s two-episode premiere is now streaming on Disney+.
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