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The Return of Chewbacca

Posted by timothy on from the ready-for-his-closeup dept.

BrunoC writes "It's official! Peter Mayhew is going to play everyone's favorite wookie once again: Chewbacca is returning in Episode III, currently in pre-production phase. Peter says (quoted from StarWars.com) "I'm delighted to return as Chewbacca, I think his re-appearance in this film is a fitting way to tie the whole saga together, especially for Wookiee fans." Woa! Just for the records: Artoo and C-3PO will be there too! You can read the official annoucement here, at StarWars.com."

31 of 493 comments (clear)

  1. Please by starseeker · · Score: 4, Funny

    Let Chewbacca take out Jar-jar! Please? I'd pay money to see that.

    --
    "I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
    1. Re:Please by kzinti · · Score: 4, Funny

      Cool idea! Kinda like a 21st-century successor to Bambi Meets Godzilla - but with lots of cool computer-rendered Jar-Jar-frag-guts as Chewie tears him to bits. "Meeza Gonna DIE!"

  2. Great by Captain+Rotundo · · Score: 4, Funny

    And with this Lucas's conversion to the dark side will be complete. Does he really have to shit all over every character from the original trilogy by associating them with the crap he's been making?

    I'd rather see chewbacca appear in a romantic comedy with sandra bullock before the shit that will be Episode III. at least then the plot would most likely make sense to anyone over the age of three.

    1. Re:Great by Henry+V+.009 · · Score: 4, Funny

      Your post is marked funny, but it's actually pretty sad. The new movies were written by a completely different author than the guy who wrote the original Star Wars. My guess is that the Earl of Oxford wrote Star Wars, and Lucas is just some hack.

  3. Remember: by rune2 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Always let the wookie win....

  4. Who cares? by Paladeen · · Score: 5, Insightful

    At this point I am so disillusioned with the new Star Wars films that I couldn't care less who'll feature in Episode III.

    The last two films have been unspeakably bad and I'm extremely skeptical that the next will be any better.

  5. I can understand... by craenor · · Score: 4, Insightful

    People not wanting plot details, but in light of the fact that this has become a "news item" ... and not just on /. either ... do you people whining about the spoiler really think you can get all the way to the movie without finding this out?

    I mean, hello...welcome to the world of computers, posters and trailers...

  6. What a wookie. by iomud · · Score: 4, Funny

    If Chewbacca is a wookie, you must acquit.

  7. Use the force... by Big+Sean+O · · Score: 4, Informative

    Step 1: Go to your preferences page.

    Step 2: Scroll down to the "Star wars Prequels" checkbox.

    Step 3: Check it.

    Step 4: Done.

    Then you won't be bothered with those pesky Star Wars articles that will contain filthy spoilers.

    Oh, you want to know about the Star Wars Prequels, but you just don't want any spoilers?

    Step 1: Stop reading slashdot.

    Step 2: You can't have everything.

    Step 2: Done.

    --
    My father is a blogger.
  8. Shameless Hucksterism by blair1q · · Score: 4, Insightful

    They needed to "tie the series together?"

    They've got Obi-Wan, Anakin, and eventually Leia and Luke to tie the series together.

    They're throwing in Chewie because:

    a) Lucas ran out of ideas a long damn time ago.
    b) Characters from the original trilogy sell better than characters from this one.
    c) Hey. Don't complain. Could have been Ewoks...

  9. Re:My God, the spoilers! by inertia187 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Spoiler from what? The preview? You're were going to find out sooner or later before the movie.

    A spoiler would be something like, oh say, that Chewbacca is bald in this episode or that he's gay or something. That would be a spoiler...not that there's anything wrong with that.

    If you want a spoiler, how's this - I hear Darth Vader won't be in this episode. How's that for spoiler?

    --
    A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
  10. Total of people in the Star Wars Universe: 26 by Gary+Yogurt · · Score: 5, Insightful

    How does everyone keep running into eachother? This galaxy of Lucas' is pretty tiny. Is Wedge going to run around in Episode III and introduce himself to everyone?

    1. Re:Total of people in the Star Wars Universe: 26 by NanoGator · · Score: 5, Interesting

      "How does everyone keep running into eachother? This galaxy of Lucas' is pretty tiny. Is Wedge going to run around in Episode III and introduce himself to everyone? "

      The theory I came up with is that the galaxy in Star Wars is VERY tiny, as "The Galaxy is on Orion's Belt" tiny. Not only does this explain why going from system to system is like going down to the store for a beer, it also explains how the Millineum Falcon can travel around various star systems with it's light-speed drive down.

      The movies make a HELL of a lot more sense with this understanding.

      --
      "Derp de derp."
  11. What about... by fishrokka · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...the rest of Chewie's family? Here's hoping Maula, Itchy, and Lumpy will also be making return appearances.

  12. Lucas to Mayhew by ath0mic · · Score: 5, Funny

    Lucas points to casting room:

    "I don't care what you smell... get in there"

  13. Re:In other news by bahamat · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You're not very smart if you think that you wouldn't see chewbacca in the tv spots 6 months before the movie's release.

    Here's another spoiler for you, Anakin will become Darth Vader and use a red light saber.

    Sorry to spoil the movie for you though.

  14. from what I heard... by newsdee · · Score: 4, Interesting

    c) Hey. Don't complain. Could have been Ewoks...

    The Ewoks were supposed to be Wookies originally. But then some genius thought they would sell more dolls if they were all small and cute and annoying. So there you go, they just had to flip the name... ee-wok... wok-ee... :-)

    With a little bit of mental exercise you can ignore what your eyes see and imagine it's the planet of the Wookies all right.
    Use the force, wook. :-)

    --
    The ENIAC Demo Competition
    1. Re:from what I heard... by Blondie-Wan · · Score: 5, Informative
      What became the ground battle (the forest part) of the Battle of Endor in Return of the Jedi was part of the early versions of the original story, back when Lucas first began working on "The Star Wars back in the '70s. Though Lucas always wanted to climax his space opera with a multi-tiered ground/space battle between the Imperial forces and rebels who had allied themselves with a low-tech society of hirsute anthropomorphic aliens (originally Wookiees), he was unable to incorporate it into the (first) movie, for lack of various resources, but still wanted to have at least one of his beloved Wookiees, so created the Chewbacca character to be Han's sidekick.

      After the original film was a colossal success and he was able to make sequels and spend more money on them he was finally able to do the forest battle he'd originally wanted, or at least something like it; however, having established (through Chewie) that Wookiees were a technologically adept people comfortable with spaceships and the like, he couldn't use Wookiees for the ground battle - part of the battle's whole reason for being was to have a technologically unsophisticated group of "primitives" overwhelm a technically superior force, and Lucas thought he'd established Wookiees as sufficiently technological that they no longer suited their original purpose. He therefore created Ewoks, who were smaller, but really amounted to the same thing as Wookiees in their original conception. Ewoks became smaller than humans (instead of larger, like Wookiees) mainly for practical considerations - not only would making them larger make them too much like Wookiees, they would also be harder to realize on screen (it's easier to find a lot of performers and stunt people the size of Kenny Baker and Warwick Davis than it is to find ones the size of Peter Mayhew, aside from which dozens or hundreds of small costumes could be made more quickly and cheaply than large ones - yes, it's that simple ;-) ).

      Another take on the idea can be found in the early post-Star Wars novel Splinter of the Mind's Eye, by Alan Dean Foster. Foster had ghostwritten the original Star Wars novelization from Lucas's script, and the novelization was published under Lucas's name; Lucas had discussed some of his then-as-yet unused story concepts for SW with Foster, including the idea of a ground battle between Imperials and an alliance of Rebels with a low-tech alien society. Shortly after the movie opened, when it was clear it was going to be successful but not clear just how successful (that is, not yet certain there would be additional movies), Foster began writing Splinter, incorporating some of Lucas's original ideas (including that one), and it was published in early '78, although by that time preproduction had begun on The Empire Strikes Back (when Foster began the novel, apparently it was intended to be the "official" continuation of the Star Wars storyline. The novel's plot-central Force-amplifying crystal was another idea Lucas had in his early work on the saga, but unlike the battle it hasn't yet made it into a film, at least not in anything like its original form, though the "midi-chlorians" of Episode I may have roots in the same ideas).

  15. Folks please by Kelz · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If you didn't like the movies don't take this post as an invitation for you to bash it. It seems like every time someone mentions some key word like "star wars" in a NEWS article, the same old damn topics always come up. I myself hated Jar Jar, but overall 1 and 2 were good movies! Lucas's "vision" was to create a precurser to the original star wars series, and he performed the task well imho. Lets keep the talk to Wookies and not weather the movie was good.

    This is not a troll, as trolls are green.

    1. Re:Folks please by oconnorcjo · · Score: 4, Insightful
      I myself hated Jar Jar, but overall 1 and 2 were good movies! Lucas's "vision" was to create a precurser to the original star wars series, and he performed the task well imho.

      Actually I thought the movies were far from good.

      Major flaws in movie 1:
      1. Anakans script was DESIGNED for somebody who was at least a teenager. No seven year old has the hots for a girl in the way Ani talked or had the time to build so much hardware or race in as many races as the movie claimed. If Ani was too old to start the training it means that Jedi's were taking babies from mothers breasts (and makes Luke's start seem rediculous).

      2. Kill the whole mediaclorite(?)/Virgin Mary mess.

      3. What is comedy relief doing in a serious space drama? Jar-jar should have been killed from the final cut.


      While movie 1 actually had a pretty good script (that was butchered in execution), movie 2 was just a bad script. There were far better stories that could have been told that would have enriched the Star Wars Universe, but instead, we get a cop story with a twist of romance. Despite the weak plot of movie 2, it was executed much better. It is a shame that the "new Anikan" was not in the first movie.

      What made the first three movies (IV-VI) so wonderfull was that they had good stories that were executed well. Very impressive to do three times in row. In the first three, Lucas was the writer but let Irvin Kershner direct V and Richard Marquand direct VI. I get the impression that Lucas is a better writer than a director/producer. Or maybe his overwhelming control over the final product puts him in a position where no-one can criticize/"provide perspective" to his creative vision anymore. Whatever the reason, the first three films are classics while the stuff made recently is just summer action flicks that would have been forgotten by most if it was not for the name brand (Star Wars) attached to it.
      --
      I miss the Karma Whores.
  16. how stupid by ceswiedler · · Score: 4, Insightful

    OK, we have a galaxy (far far away) with at least a few thousand planets. Each planet would presumably have on the order of 1-10 billion inhabitants. So what are the chances that:

    1. a "remote" planet called Tatooine continually becomes vitally important to the fate of the galaxy, time and time again?

    2. The same five to ten characters coincidentally reappear, time and time again? C-3PO was actually made by Anakin and just happened to be on the ship that was attacked near Tatooine and end up on Luke's farm? Now Chewbacca is going to show up, as a "coincidence?"

    I suppose you could make arguments about the 'Force' making these coincidences happen. But you have to admit that's retro-explanations. Everything in Episodes 4-6 indicated that these characters were meeting for the first time, with no prior history. Now Lucas (and Star Wars fanboys) want to convince us that "no, really there's a whole previous story with these characters, which was never alluded to in the 'later' episodes."

    It just goes to show what a crap storyteller Lucas is these days. How he got that way, I don't know. But Star Wars these days is about as well-written as the Daredevil movie.

    1. Re:how stupid by bigdavex · · Score: 4, Funny

      C-3PO was actually made by Anakin and just happened to be on the ship that was attacked near Tatooine and end up on Luke's farm? Now Chewbacca is going to show up, as a "coincidence?"

      I think you have a very insightful point here. For me, the galaxy stopped feeling big after Empire. There are lots of examples:
      Why the hell was Lando suddenly a general? Didn't the rebels have a command structure.

      But . . . I think the particular example of the droids showing up at Tatooine has an explanation. Leia is taking the plans to Obi-wan. Obi-wan intentionally lives near Luke.

      The real head-scratcher is why would Luke be on Tatooine. Yeah, his uncle's there, but your step-father's house doesn't seem like the best place to hide someone, given the whole galaxy to choose from.

      Somebody once suggested that Obi-wan and Vader are really in league (against the emperor and Yoda, the latter of which I think is a real stretch.)

      But try this on for size:

      Suppose Obiwan and Vader are really in league against the Emperor in episodes 4-6.

      Consider this --
      • Sometime after episode 2, Obiwan "hides" Luke on Vader's *home planet*. At his step father's house.

      • Vader "intercepts" a rebel ship, and then his daughter and droids leave with the plans to the Death Star.

      • Vader and Obiwan's duel distracts the Storm Troopers, allowing the heroes to escape the Death Star on the Falcon.

      • All of Imperials on the Death Star die except for the super-human pilot Vader, who "crashes" into his wingman, freeing up the shot for his son.

      • In episode 5, Vader shows he's a heartless SOB . . . by choking to death a slew of Imperial officers and sending the Imperial fleet into an astroid
        field.

      • In episode 6, Vader consciously allows the rebels to land on the moon of Endor.

      • On the new Death Star, Vader says a bunch of things to Luke that don't support this hypothesis, so please ignore them.

      • Vader, in the Jedi tradition, throws the emperor down A Really Big Hole.
      --
      -Dave
  17. Hey, it could bode *well* for the movie... by Blondie-Wan · · Score: 4, Insightful
    ... after all, given Lucas's dialogue of late, the greater the percentage of characters in a prequel who don't speak English, the better... ;-)

    In seriousness, though, I'm not wild about this; I love Chewie as much as anyone, but to tie him to the storyline at this early point and then just happen to have him intersect with it again in the classic trilogy just pushes coincidence too far, IMO. Characters like Obi-Wan, Anakin / Vader, Luke, Leia, Artoo and Threepio, Yoda, Owen, Beru, etc. who have some connection to the royal houses of Naboo and / or Alderaan and / or the Skywalker family legacy make sense for inclusion in the prequels, but for characters from other circles (Han, Chewie, Lando, Jabba, Boba, etc.) who weren't already established in the originals as being connected to them to suddenly turn out to have some prior connection after all shrinks the Star Wars universe a little too much, I think (but then, that's hardly the biggest problem with the prequels...).

    *sigh* Oh, well. I'll still see it, I'm sure, and I hope it's better than the first two (hey, it's possible, right?), and I similarly hope Chewie's return / "debut" is either handled in a plausible way, or is simply good enough not to object to (or better yet, both). I guess we'll see...

  18. Re:My God, the spoilers! by DA-MAN · · Score: 5, Funny

    A great many bothans died to get this information across, and you dare to complain?!?!

    --
    Can I get an eye poke?
    Dog House Forum
  19. Re:My God, the spoilers! by descentr · · Score: 5, Informative

    There's a simple solution to your problem. Turn off the Star Wars Prequels topic in your preferences. The creators of this site put that there for a reason. The editiors can't help you if you won't help yourself.

  20. Re:My God, the spoilers! by letxa2000 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    It's the characters that made the first Star Wars movies a hit. The characters in general and, specifically, Harrison Ford. If you take out Harrison Ford from the original movies you get, in all honesty, a pretty dull 6 hours of movies. Try to imagine it--he's really the only one with any charisma or humor whatsoever.

    What's been lacking in Episode I and II isn't so much a really cool plot--the plots of the other 3 weren't that impressive, they were just fun to watch due to how the characters played it out. What's been lacking in the first two Episodes is someone(s) who is/are truly humorous and/or charismatic.

  21. Re:Big freaking deal by bahamat · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The classic exmaple is a star destroyer vs. the enterprise.

    And the SD would "win" if they fought at any reasonable range

    Actually, this is not true. Star Destroyers use lasers for weaponry (well, turbo-lasers but lasers nonetheless). May I quote some dialog from the TNG episode The Outrageous Okona:

    Worf: They're locking lasers.
    Riker: Lasers? That won't even penetrate the hull.
    Picard: Well, shields up anyway, we wouldn't want them to think we aren't taking them seriously.

    So a SD with all of it's thousands of lasers might do enough damage to scratch the NCC-1701-D registry right off. The best hope would be simply ramming, either with all those TIEs or just the SD itself, but unless the Enterprise was incapacitated first it would easily move out of the way being a smaller more manuverable ship.

  22. Re:My God, the spoilers! by dvdeug · · Score: 4, Insightful

    given that Chewey is one of the most beloved characters in all of Star Wars, I really think this would have gone over better as a surprise.

    What are the odds that it would have been a surprise by the time that Star Wars came out?

  23. Re: Ahhhh... by Blondie-Wan · · Score: 4, Funny

    ... now, this is the kind of debate that makes Slashdot Slashdot... ;-)

  24. New Explanation by Daetrin · · Score: 4, Funny
    Han Solo can't actually understand Wookie. Chewbacca understands english just fine, so he knows what Han is saying to him, but Han is just pretending that he knows what Chewbacca is saying back. So the whole time Chewie is saying things like "Skywalker? I think i met his dad twenty years ago!" and Han just tells him to go fix a stabalizer or something.

    C3PO either can't understand R2-D2, or for some reason chooses not to communicate what he says, so R2-D2 is running around saying things like "Watch out Luke! Vader is your father!" and "Hey Yoda! How's it hangin?" and Threepio doesn't bother to translate them.

    Maybe Threepio is still secretly loyal to Vader and doesn't want to tip Luke off?

    --
    This Space Intentionally Left Blank
  25. Re:My God, the spoilers! by voixderaison · · Score: 4, Funny
    There are lots of people intentionally avoiding all information about Star Wars.
    There are even more people desperately trying to forget everything they know about Episode I & Episode II, and still more offering to chip in so Lucas can afford a script writer for Episode III.
    --
    Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler. -- Albert Einstein