George Lucas wanted the droids from Star Wars to be Eddie Murphy, says producer

In the late 1970s, Michael Hirsh took a chance. An experimental filmmaker whose love of art (and occasional LSD trips) drove him to animation, Hirsh eventually turned his passion into a business, producing independent features and shorts that caught the attention of the industry. And one eye would change his life: George Lucas. In 1978, Lucas commissioned Hirsh and his company Nelvana to create an animated short film for the upcoming Star Wars Christmas Special on CBS. The special may have been legendary bad, but Hirsh delivered the best part, an animated introduction to Boba Fett, and launched an incredible career, having produced everything from Inspector Gadget, Beetlejuice (the series), Babar, The Adventures of Tintin, The Care Bears MovieAnd The Magic School Bus.

Hirsh even worked with Lucas a second time and established the “Saturday Morning Cartoonization” of Star Wars in the form of two series: Ewoks And DroidsIn this exclusive excerpt from Hirsh’s memoir Animation Nation: How we built a cartoon empireThe producer explains the challenges of working with Lucas at a time when Nelvana needed financial success, the question of who the droids of Star Wars would be without Luke Skywalker, and the bizarre history of the Ewoks theme song.

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Around this time, I received another surprise call from Lucasfilm telling me that they had two animated war of stars Spin-offs to the ABC network: Droidsabout the adventures of R2D2 and C3PO and Ewoksabout the wild but lovable creatures that lived on the planet Endor. The shows were part of George Lucas’ plan to expand the merchandising business for war of stars in the absence of new war of stars movies. Each series was designed so that every three or four episodes could be combined into video movies. I was surprised that George did not want Darth Vader, Luke, Leia or Hans to appear in the shows, but we got permission to use some of the war of stars Theme music.

Nelvana produced both shows, creating the storyboards and layouts in Toronto and then animating overseas. We have Droids in Korea with Steven Hahn and Ewoks in Taiwan with James Wang. A lot of blood, sweat and tears went into the great show, but none of the series were well received. Droids lasted only one season and Ewoks two. I think one of the problems we encountered was that Saturday morning television had too many restrictions on violence. We weren’t allowed to show anything that children could imitate, so our weapons looked more like vacuum cleaners or channel changers than war of stars Weapons. The Ewoks in the film were cute, but they were also warriors, and that tension got in the way of a successful children’s show. The plan to do multi-part episodes also became a challenge because ABC standards and practices prohibited children from ending episodes with cliffhangers. We had to make each episode self-contained. Cable television, not bound by FCC regulations, would be a better home for later war of stars Spinoffs like The Clone Wars.

One of the interesting aspects of both series, but especially Droids, was George’s love of deep backgrounds and world-building. He introduced us to the works and theories of Joseph Campbell, whose analysis of mythical heroes and their journeys had a great influence on war of stars. Ewoks was relatively easy, as it was largely inspired by the world of Endor in Return of the JediBut Droids was planned to have new main characters every four episodes, with R2D2 and C3PO being the only remaining characters. George also constantly changed his mind about whether he wanted it to be more comedic or more action-packed. The two main droids were Laurel and Hardy from war of stars Saga, but sometimes George wanted them to be like Yosemite Sam or other Warner Bros. cartoon stars, and sometimes he wanted them to be like Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop“We never found the right direction for the series.”

While Ewoks went more smoothly, it brought with it one of the most difficult production problems I have ever experienced. George had chosen singer and songwriter Taj Mahal to write and sing the theme song for the show. The demo he delivered was pretty rough. Just a week before the air date, I flew to Hawaii to attend his recording session for the final version, and Taj was nowhere to be found. The sound engineer sent us to the lounge of a local hotel where we were able to recruit a couple of singers to jazz up the demo piece with new vocals. We were in the middle of recording it when Taj Mahal happened to walk into the studio. Thankfully, he liked what we were doing and re-recorded his lead vocals. Despite all this, ABC never liked the theme song, so they commissioned a completely different song for the second season.

During our work on the war of stars Shows, George introduced me to John Lasseter, the head of Lucasfilm’s CGI production arm, which later became known as Pixar when it was sold to Apple. George would have liked to do computer animation for Droids And Ewoks. The technology wasn’t there yet, but John was on the critical path to developing it, and worked on the animation side alongside Ed Catmull, who was more focused on the software and technology side. Back then, this type of computer processing required large mainframes that filled a room. We didn’t start taking computer animation seriously until about eight years later, but then we started computerizing painting, inbetweening, animation, and eventually the whole shebang. The reason we outsourced our inbetweening, painting, and shooting to Asia was Inspector Gadget was that in North America and Europe, the cost of painting an episode was equal to the cost of animating that episode. In the 1990s, thanks to computer-aided painting systems, we were able to move that work back to Canada and get Canadian tax credits for doing it in-house.

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Don’t feel too bad for Hirsh – after Droids And Ewok, The producer continued The Care Bears Moviewhich became the most successful non-Disney animated film of its time in 1985. And many more shows followed. You can find more anecdotes from the cartoon boom of the 90s at Animation Nation: How we built a cartoon empire.