40 Years Ago, One ‘Star Wars’ Sequel Bravely Asked: What If We Killed Luke in the First Scene?

Imagine that you went to see The Empire Strikes Back when it first opened, and that the movie began with a serene scene featuring Princess Leia, who moments later comes across the Rebel base on Hoth in the midst of a violent Stormtrooper siege. She spots Luke Skywalker heroically helping to defend the base, and then… Luke gets freakin’ blown up and killed! That’s minute six, and the movie just continues on from there with no takebacks. Sorry, Luke. RIP.

This is pretty much what Ewoks: The Battle for Endor did in 1985, in one of the wilder and more abrupt moves for any Star Wars sequel and family movie sequels in general. As The Battle for Endor reaches its 40th anniversary – it first aired November 24, 1985, on ABC – let’s take a look back at how the second Ewoks TV movie decided to mercilessly deal with a hugely prominent young character from the first.

A year earlier, 1984’s Caravan of Courage: The Ewok Adventure introduced the Towanis, a family of humans who crash on Endor. After their parents vanish, the Towani kids, Mace (Eric Walker) and Cindel (Aubree Miller), are discovered and taken in by the Ewoks. Young Cindel (Miller was around 5 when she made the movie) finds a fast friend in Wicket (Warwick Davis, naturally), while Mace must step up and become a hero in order to help save his parents from the clutches of the Gorax, the monster that has taken their parents.

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Though functioning as an ensemble story, with Cindel and Wicket getting plenty of screen time, if anyone is the main character in Caravan of Courage, it’s Mace, which is made pretty clear from the get-go by just how blatantly he’s meant to be a surrogate for Luke Skywalker. Eric Walker’s resemblance to a younger Mark Hamill is very obvious; not only has Mace been given a Luke-style haircut, but he’s dressed in an orange X-Wing pilot-style uniform for the entire movie. (As for his name, yes, George Lucas had an affinity for the name Mace, having put a character named Mace Windy in early drafts of Star Wars before the prequel trilogy cast Samuel L. Jackson as a Jedi with the slightly altered name Mace Windu).

Though he has no Force-powers, the teenage Mace Towani is introduced as a Luke-esque callow youth who must rise to the occasion and save the day by the end of the story. As a tiny kid, Cindel is (wisely) left out of the final battle almost entirely, while Mace and several Ewoks battle the Gorax. When Mace’s newfound Ewok pal, the valiant Chukha-Trok, succumbs to injuries, he gifts his battle-ax to Mace as his dying act, and Mace then promptly uses that ax to kill the Gorax and free his parents. A hero’s journey has been journey’d!

And yet you wouldn’t guess any of that based on how The Battle for Endor treats Mace. The sequel almost immediately finds Cindel and Wicket coming across an attack on the Ewok village by a fiendish group known as the Sanyassan Marauders. When Cindel spots Mace, he’s trying to defend the village from the Marauders with a blaster, alongside their apparently already-dead mom (!). He says all of nine words to his sister – “Get back, Cindel! Stay away! Get help! Get Dad!” – before he drags his mom’s body into a hut, at which point the Marauders fire a large cannon, and we (and Cindel) see a big explosion from afar. And that’s it for him.

It’s not actually completely obvious that Mace was meant to be killed at that moment until a couple of minutes later, after Cindel has found her dad (perennial ’80s movie jerk Paul Gleason, best known for Die Hard and The Breakfast Club, getting a rare non-jerk role here) and declares, “Mommy, Mace, they’re dead,” to which her dad replies “I know.” Which probably isn’t intended as a callback to Leia and Han’s famous “I love you,” “I know” moment but is very darkly funny if it was. Dad only gets to survive just a few minutes more before he’s killed too, and then Cindel’s off on a new adventure with Wicket and, you guessed it, Wilford Brimley! Brimley plays Noa, a human who helps protect Cindel from the Marauders as the story continues.

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But going back to the beginning, it’s hard not to linger on the question of what the hell they were thinking by killing Mace in the first place. The parents would be cruel enough – considering Caravan of Courage’s central quest is to rescue them, that already gives The Battle for Endor its own “Killing Hicks and Newt at the start of Alien 3”-adjacent vibe – but taking out Mace seems so extreme. He’s like 14 years old and was a centerpiece of the first Ewok movie.

The other thing about Mace is, well, he kind of sucks. No disrespect meant to the then-young Walker, who was doing what he was asked to do, but throughout much of Caravan of Courage, Mace is basically stuck in the oft-parodied, super whiny mode we briefly saw from Luke when we first met him. Imagine if Luke stayed at a “But I was going into Tosche Station to pick up some power converters!” level for the entirety of Star Wars, except sometimes he got even more annoying, and you get the idea. Mace is constantly complaining, constantly yelling and basically a big pain in the neck for way too much of the story before he gets to step up in the third act.

In a 2000 interview with EON Magazine (as recounted back then by TheForce.net), The Battle for Endor co-writer and director Ken Wheat revealed that the idea to kill off Cindel’s entire family came directly from George Lucas, who has a Story By credit on both Ewok telefilms. Said Wheat, “Lucas guided the creation of the story over the course of two four-hour sessions we had with him. He’d just watched Heidi with his daughter the weekend before these took place, and the story idea he pushed was having the little girl from the first Ewok TV movie become an orphan who ends up living with a grumpy old hermit in the woods.”

Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Hence, out with the parents, out with Mace, and in with Wilford Brimley. It’s all Heidi’s fault! Of course, Lucas may have felt differently had audiences responded strongly to Mace, but I highly suspect he saw that character hadn’t exactly been a breakout from the first movie and decided he was done with him. And with the Ewoks mainly appealing to a very young audience at the time, compared to Star Wars in general, it does make a certain amount of sense to keep the focus on just the youngest kid from the first movie, as mercenary as it also felt to do so in this manner. Frankly, neither Ewok movie is actually good, but The Battle for Endor especially feels almost entirely aimed at very young children, with the story keeping things notably simple. Hell, Wicket just speaks understandable English in this one (or Basic, if you want to stick with Star Wars terminology), because why not?

Both Ewoks TV movies were eventually deemed Star Wars Legends content, meaning none of the Towani family exist in canon, at least not yet. But elements from those movies have eventually been incorporated into canon, such as the creatures from The Battle for Endor known as blurrgs, which were used in the animated Star Wars: The Clone Wars and finally made their way back into live action in The Mandalorian. So maybe Cindel and Mace can return as well one day, and Mace can get a bit of redemption for that harsh death? You never know. That galaxy far, far away is a pretty big one after all.