Posted 10 May 2005 - 01:42 PM
The whole "budget constraint" thing is hand-waving nonsense. In THE APARTMENT, Wilder made the office seem bigger by having the desks get progressively smaller in the background. Similar fakery could have made tall wookiees out of men as short as 6'. And hell, how many would you need? Cameron budgeted ALIENS on the promise that he could portray an entire swarm with only 6 alien suits, and he pulled it off. Lucas made Ewoks because he knew more kids would want a teddy bear than another series of action figures.
Frankly, the whole argument about how Chewbacca was too technologically adept for his species to be savages, and Lucas's apparent interest in having an army of savages fight the Empire - nature vs technology being a running theme - is more credible, but I still think it's a lie to cover the marketing. Let's see whether it holds up in ROTS: will the wookiees be shooting off guns and fixing space ships, or will they be savages. My bet is the latter, and Lucas will forget all of his earlier justifications.
"I had a lot of different ideas. At one point, Luke, Leia and Ben were all going to be little people, and we did screen tests to see if we could do that." -George Lucas, in STAR WARS: the Annotated Screenplays (p197).