“I will protect you. I will be Mom and Dad.”

Top-tier dialogue right there, folks.

My journey watching through all of the miscellaneous Star Wars movies continues with The Ewok Adventure (also called Caravan of Courage), and I was kind of dreading this one after all of the things that I heard about it. Yeah, it was pretty boring, but definitely not as shockingly awful as The Holiday Special. However, saying that you’re not as bad as The Holiday Special probably isn’t much of a compliment, either.

Now, there is definitely some stuff to appreciate here, especially considering that it was a TV movie made in the early 80s. It actually had a pretty large budget for the time, considering that it was meant to air alongside commercials and all of that (it cost roughly three million dollars, which would be equivalent to about ten million today), and you can definitely see some of that money on screen. There are a bunch of unique and interesting new creatures throughout, and while the stop motion used to bring them to life isn’t anywhere near as good as anything in the original trilogy, it’s still rather commendable (for the most part - some of it looks pretty bad). Just like the originals, matte paintings are used to great effect as well.

While it was most likely just due to budgetary restrictions, we do get to see a little bit more of the forest moon of Endor, enough to technically call it “worldbuilding,” I guess. It was never one of my favorite locations from the original three films (even though I love it in 2017’s Battlefront II), so seeing more than just forests and trees, even though that kind of simultaneously removes the “forest” from the name of the moon, made for a bit of a nice change of scenery. At the same time, though, a lot of locations are pretty bland and unexciting.

Easily, what made this a bit of a trudge to get through was the acting. I’m going to go ahead and get this out of the way by saying that I don’t blame the child actors whatsoever, but these are undoubtedly some of the worst child performances I’ve ever seen (especially Mace, who is the older brother to the other main character, his younger sister, Cindel). The reason I don’t blame the child actors, which I don’t think is really ever fair to begin with, as I think that bad performances are mostly to blame on casting directors, is that most of the scenes with them feel like they were literally only given one take. Both of our leads constantly repeat lines of dialogue twice for seemingly no reason, and worst of all, the actor who plays Mace stumbles on his words numerous times, which kind of made for a bit of a laughable experience, to be honest. I just don’t understand being a director, seeing your actors clearly struggling, and just going with the bad take. It makes no sense to me, even for a TV movie.

And while I know this is a TV movie, specifically designed to fit in between commercial breaks, the pacing is still really wonky, nonetheless. The central plot of the film is that our two leads have lost their parents, but thankfully find some Ewoks to help go and rescue them from some sort of large creature that they see in an unexplained premonition device (I have no idea what to even call it). The problem with the pacing, however, is that it is extremely episodic, with each subsequent sequence being some sort of extremely random complication that our characters have to solve. None of these events does anything to push the narrative forward or develop anyone, and they seriously feel like the writers were just doing whatever they could to pad out the runtime as much as possible.

It’s a film that, in addition to everything else, just feels completely out of place in the Star Wars universe, too. It’s not even because of all the additional lore that we’ve gotten over the years, no, I couldn’t imagine this feeling in-universe even in 1984 when all there was Star Wars, story-wise, were three movies and some books. There are a bunch of cool and interesting new practical creatures, yes, but also a bunch of real-world animals as well, such as horses, goats, and even an owl. Surely it wouldn’t have been that expensive to dress up the horses, for instance, to look like something else? On top of that, blasters are referred to as guns (and don’t act like actual blasters), there are fairies and weird magical stuff, and God’s name is even used in vain, which I don’t like in any movie, but it also automatically takes you out of the experience when you hear God’s name used in any way in Star Wars content.

I know it probably comes off as a bit corny to write long and passionate reviews about some of the random and obscure Star Wars movies, like The Holiday Special, the LEGO specials, and the Ewok movies, but it really is just all for the fun of it. That doesn’t save this movie from being really bad, however. I am still somewhat curious to check out its sequel, Ewoks: The Battle for Endor, as I’ve heard it’s darker and more serious.