Warwick Davis' Tongue Gave Wicket One Advantage Over Every Other Star Wars Ewok
Forget Wookiees. Ewoks are the best! No one throw blue milk at me, but as much as I love Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew, Joonas Suotamo), having Ewoks, led by Wicket (Warwick Davis), as the furry creatures in the climactic battle of "Star Wars: Episode VI — Return of the Jedi" was perfect. If you were a kid when that film came out, adorable angry teddy bears with spears who maybe eat people were just about perfect. Wicket was the first Ewok audiences got to meet when he ran into Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) on the moon of Endor after she crashes.
The thing that worked so well in that very first scene was how animated Wicket looked. He was a fully-realized character, despite the fact that the face of the costume didn't really move any better than something you'd pick up at Party City. From his bouncy walk as he joins Leia on a fallen tree trunk for a snack to his puppy-like head tilting to his vocalizations made him real for any kid who loved "Star Wars." As it turns out, the Wicket costume may have been a bit different from the other Ewok suits, according to Davis's recollections in issue 67 of the Star Wars Insider magazine.
'I happened to get quite a good-looking Ewok costume'
Davis told the publication about his costume specifically and the feature it had that gave him a possible advantage over the other actors playing Ewoks. He explained:
"I happened to get quite a good-looking Ewok costume, just by luck again. He's got a little white belly and a little white on the middle of his face, you know, and he's got a nicely proportioned look to him. Second, I was able to get my own tongue through between the teeth in the head. These heads were inanimate; there was no movement. So, luckily, I could get my tongue through, which actually gave the face a bit of life and there was a little bit of movement there.
"They were able to insert some little sounds of dialogue in those places as well, and it just helped to give that little extra bit of life to it all. Again, it was just by luck the way the head fitted me I could do that. I don't know of any other Ewoks that were able to do that."
Rewatching the scene where Wicket first meets Leia in the forest, I didn't think I'd notice his tongue, but I did. It's not something you'd pick up unless you were looking for it (which I guarantee you will be now), but it does give him more depth to his character. There is just a tiny bit more realism that added life to Wicket. Even after all the viewings I've had of "Return of the Jedi" over all these years, I didn't realize how little actual movement there was in those costumes.
'It was fairly confining'
Davis spoke about how uncomfortable the costume was ... for a while. He said that the suit "was fairly confining, but the more you wear those things, the more they loosen up." He recalled that the pieces would be layered, explaining:
"We had a foam undersuit, which would change my shape to the shape of Wicket, and then over the top would be the fur. Of course, there were joints at the wrists for the gloves and joints at the ankles for the feet. There weren't any shoes inside, they were purely sort of a foam sculpture of the feet, so when you were walking around you were walking on an inch and a half of foam latex, which is quite funny because it gave a bit of spring to your step but also sent you sort of meandering a little bit."
Those feet actually sound pretty comfy. The "spring to your step" and the "meandering" that Davis mentions were clear in the finished film, and it gave a sense of a different sort of creature than we'd met before. That said, Davis called the suit "pretty hot" once the head went on, and it was really hard to see.
'They were spending millions of dollars on these movies'
The thing about the headpiece is that it fogged up in the eye area, making it really difficult to see out of. Davis noted:
"[...] The eyes were made of an orange plastic, so everything you saw was kind of tinted orange. Minutes after the head went on, they started to mist over so you just saw this orange blur. They were spending millions of dollars on these movies, and they couldn't figure out a way to keep these eyes from misting up [laughs]. And the leather hood really was designed to cover any sort of joints around the neck area, so that's why Ewoks wore hoods you see, for no other reason than that."
So, basically, there was no vent for the heat and moisture that comes off a warm body, and the hood kept any air from getting in. Hot lights and lots of movement must have made that costume incredibly uncomfortable. Of course, it looked great, and still holds up all these decades later.
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