Do you remember what you were doing 40 years ago today?  Maybe you were waking up early, because Saturday Morning Cartoons were still a big deal.  ABC TV in the United States would premiere the first episode of The Ewoks and Droids Adventure Hour, animated by Nelvana.  Reportedly, the studio has paused production on new animation just last week.

On September 7, 1985, we got to see what would be a common trend in popular IP. After the adults and big kids moved on, you reinvent it for kids. I was one of those kids, so I was really excited to see R2-D2 and C-3PO come back alongside Wicket, Logray, Teebo, and everybody else. The backgrounds and animation were really excellent, with voice acting from one familiar voice and the rest provided by Canada's finest.  Oh, and Vlix was in it.

If you've never seen these cartoons, Disney+ has them all. These cartoons were effectively the finale of Star Wars in mainstream culture in the 1980s.  The Marvel comic would run until 1987, when Star Tours opened and West End Games kicked off its RPG.  Both were exciting expansions, but the former was locked behind a massive vacation paywall while the latter was a series of books and miniatures. 

In theory, Ewoks and Droids existed to sell a bunch of toys. Ewoks already had a robust licensing program with greeting cards, posters, vinyl banks, and Kenner's pretty neat preschool toy line with a playset and two figures. In 1984, we got The Ewok Adventure, which was A New Hope-d with the name Caravan of Courage due to international theatrical release which was used on the prints of VHS and DVD releases in the 1990s and 2000s.  If anyone just calls it The Ewok Adventure, they probably saw it on TV in 1984.  But I digress.

An Ewoks cartoon action figure line didn't fare terribly well, only including Logray and Wicket with the other four slots occupied by four Duloks. King Gorneesh, Urgah Lady Gorneesh, Dulok Scout, and Dulak Shaman figures would darken pegs at Kay-Bee Toys for $1 for a few years after the line's brief run. The cartoon mostly focused on adventure and magic, expanding Endor into more than just the forests of Return of the Jedi and bringing in more characters. Some of the characters might have even come from off-planet, hinting at other explorers and adventurers in stories we'd never see. And of you were a teenager or older, you probably just dismissed it as Star Wars Care Bears.

It's a bit tougher to watch as an adult, but the whole deal is streaming complete with a catchy theme song from Taj Mahal. Check out a few episodes. Morag the Tulgah Witch was a fun baddie for a kid show, and watching the writers do cartwheels coming up with relatively nonviolent adventures for an increasingly lowercase-c conservative media landscape resulted in some creative stories. One particularly memorable episode followed the Ewoks and Duloks fighting over soap that could turn berries invisible, a departure from the increasingly common "hero gang fights villain gang" trope on a lot of toy-forward programs. The show was almost completely all-aliens on a planet with minimal human interference. We haven't seen that since. The show ran for two years, but its companion got more action figures.

Wax prototypes of unproduced Ewoks have surfaced, and would make great The Retro Collection releases.  We live in a world with no Latara figures. A canceled second series which oddly didn't feature the most important characters was on deck and they're a little more famous.   Bondo, Chief Chirpa, Paploo, Chituhr, Morag, and Weechee just were not meant to be.  I hope this can be corrected.

The one I really got excited by was Droids Tossed-off references to all sorts of things would go on to define the franchise, although it hasn't been referenced quite as much since George Lucas left to go collect art and other things. 40 years ago today, I was watching and totally flipping out over The White Witch. R2-D2 and C-3PO crash in an orange desert, meet up with a couple of gearheads whose hair seem not entirely out of touch with today's kids, and run into Tig Fromm and - you guessed it - Vlix. Vlix was muscle to keep an eye on Tig's operation which had him as an evil tech guy before it was a popular career choice.

Unlike Ewoks, Droids had 4-5 episode cycles that tended to work well as stand-alone stories but also could be stitched together into one big story. That was unusual for the time. The series certainly worked hard to help sell toys from Return of the Jedi and The Power of the Force lines, as eagle-eyed fans would spot mini-rigs alongside brief appearances by Imperial Shuttles, Lightsabers, A-Wings, B-Wings, Gamorrean Guards, IG-88, Stormtroopers, and more. You'd even hear references to Jabba the Hutt and the Emperor, but very few movie characters actually appear in the series. It was nice. I miss it.

The show's theme song was written by Stewart Copeland, who was more famous for his work with The Police and not as famous for his entertaining Klark Kent releases.   Lucasfilm really did get some amazing talent to work on these shows.   Paul Dini, of Batman: The Animated Series fame, worked on these shows.

But how did the toys turn out?  Kenner repainted R2-D2 and C-3PO in cartoon colors, while carrying forward Boba Fett and the A-Wing Pilot.  They also made eight other figures, but left a pretty big second series on the table.  Vlix, Mungo Baobab, Kleb Zellock, Admiral Screed, Koong, Gaff, Jessica Meade, and Mon Julpa were denied to an audience who grew up and moved on.  Those may not be household names, but the characters all appeared on multiple episodes of the show.  Mungo was the star of his episodes, and Screed was the only member of the Empire to (almost) get an action figure from these shows.

And of course I bring this up because it's not only an important anniversary, but to remind you to harass Disney, Lucasfilm, and Hasbro to finally make a Vlix action figure. The Kenner prototype was eventually released as a product in Brazil, but it never got a US release. Now's a good time to say "Hey, how about it?"  Yeah, I did a lot of rambling just to get to that again.