I happened to see one of the old Ewoks cartoons on Youtube the other day. It was a pretty good fantasy cartoon of the era. It prompted me to recall than "Endor" is the Quenya name for Middle Earth, which may or may not be relevant.
Anyway, I feel like halflings/hobbits could be replaced with ewoks with very little difficult and bring a slightly different feel to things.
Endor is also a real place mentioned in the Bible. It was a city in Galilee. It is most famously known as the home of the "Witch of Endor" who met with King Saul.
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endor_(village)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_of_Endor
My childhood memories may be deceiving me but I recall that being one of the better cartoons of its day. Not quite willing to try a revisit as an adult for fear of spoiling that impression of it.
ReplyDeleteSwapping out Tolkein hobbits would be bit of a stretch, since you'd want a forest in place of the Shire and ewoks aren't generally fusty homebodies and all that, but the stereotypical D&D halflings would be an easier replacement. Give the new "small folk" arboreal habitats instead of hobbit-holes, adapt some of them to city living for the "show up everywhere humans do" thing, and if you liked the "wandering raft dweller/explorer" concept that 3/3.5 and 4E peddled (which I did, personally) the ewoks fit just as well as halflings ever did, arguably better.
And hey, you even get to keep teh furry feet if that's your fetish. :)
@joseph- I'm aware, but I thought adding Ewoks to the Bible might be all bridge too far. :D
ReplyDeleteI don't think I ever saw the Ewoks cartoon, but one of my parents' "taped from tv" VHS tapes had either Caravan of Courage or Battle for Endor on it. (Or, for all I know, both.)
ReplyDeleteEwoks replacing hobbits would be an interesting substitution! It would also open the way to replace elves with a species that doesn't live in the forest. (Or, I guess you could replace dwarves with another arboreal species and really triple-down on the forest as campaign setting!)
Interesting that the idea of ewoks is "going around" these days. My son is designing his own Star Wars game (with a D&D chassis) and one of the five or six playable races is ewok. He's put together a gaming group at school and already has an ewok pilot PC.
ReplyDelete; )
I never had a chance to watch the cartoons as a kid (I saw both the TV movies and, in fact, designed D&D adventures loosely based on their plots). However, when we lived in Paraguay we were able to procure a DVD with the entire two (?) series of cartoons. They're kid fare...something along the same lines as the smurfs, but they're fine not bad. If memory serves the show was cancelled at a weird point in the ongoing story, but it's been years since we watched it because the disks don't work on our (American) DVD player.
Too bad, because both my kids would probably get a kick out of seeing the show now that they're older (my six year old daughter especially).
@anne - I think you could do an all SW substitution! Ugnaughts for dwarves, Gamorreans for orcs. Maybe Wookies for elves (leaning into the redundancy of forest dwelling ewoks)? Or maybe Yoda folk for elves.
ReplyDeleteI gave one of my early D&D characters an Ewok henchman; this was shortly after ROTJ came out.
ReplyDeleteAt the time we had no second thoughts about adding material from any source. In that vein, how about Ewoks for halflings, Vulcans for elves and Morlocks for dwarves?
@zenopus - I like the way you think.
ReplyDelete@Zenopus -- I was just thinking about Vulcans and Romulans as Space Elves, after recently binging on the Star Trek: Picard series. There is a Romulan character in it that is lifted almost straight out of Tolkien -- his name is even "Elnor," which is, ironically enough (or maybe not so ironically), Quenya for "Star Country."
ReplyDeleteVulcans could be Gray Elves, Romulans High Elves, and various Vulcanoids Wood Elves...
I recall some good episodes in the first season, including a really good conflict with the evil witch. Later the show was lightened up (in story tone and color palette) and became forgettable. I just saw it pop in on Disney+, so I may need to revisit the series!
ReplyDelete@ Tom:
ReplyDeleteYep, the whole Ewok series (as well as both ewok movies) just popped up on Disney+ under "Vintage" Star Wars. Just saw that last night.