Illustration by Audrey Estok (@AudreyEstok)
The Ewoks are a species of miniature, bipedal, shamanistic bears whose Neolithic civilization of tree-canopy villages seemingly span their entire world, the forest moon of Endor. As depicted in Return of the Jedi, Endor was one of the final theaters in the war between the Galactic Empire and the Rebel Alliance; and while they were a late addition to the coalition against Emperor Palpatine’s totalitarian regime, the Ewoks played a crucial part. They sheltered the heroes of the Rebellion and fought in the climactic ground battle—and they helped lead the victory celebration. Following the release of Return of the Jedi, the critters starred in two live-action TV prequels (The Ewok Adventure and Ewoks: The Battle for Endor) and an animated series which transformed them into a magical Care Bear pastiche.
Despite their apparent popularity with general audiences, the Ewoks did not receive the best reception from the more ardent fanbase. Filmmaker (and prominent Star Wars fan) Kevin Smith even referred to the Ewoks as the original trilogy’s “cross to bear,” comparing them to Jar-Jar Binks. That poor reception has been partially responsible for the rise to a peculiarly tenacious fan theory, which hypothesizes a fiery end for the spear-throwing furballs.
On August 9, 1997, astrophysicist Curtis Saxton wrote a 10,000-word article on his proto-blog Star Wars Technical Commentaries, hosted by the fan site TheForce.Net. The article was titled “Endor Holocaust.” Saxton detailed how the explosion of the second Death Star, as seen in the climax of Return of the Jedi, would have resulted in “an environmental disaster” comparable to a “gargantuan nuclear-winter effect,” triggering a mass extinction.
Saxton focused on what would have happened when massive chunks of the exploded Death Star II fell onto Endor. He guessed that the station orbited about 2,000 kilometers above the moon’s surface, and that “at least thirty multi-kilometre solid chunks” of debris would have struck the forest moon with a velocity of at least 80 kilometers per second—and within a mere half-minute of the explosion.
But this didn’t happen. Despite Saxton’s attempt to support his thesis with a handful of Expanded Universe sources, he ran into the fact that the end of Return of the Jedi depicts Endor intact and the Ewoks very much alive.
Nevertheless, the theory has bubbled up within the Star Wars mythos a few times since. The December 2002 issue of Star Wars Tales included a story titled “Apocalypse Endor,” in which an older, retired Stormtrooper relays the horrors of fighting a guerilla war against cannibal Ewoks and then takes solace in their annihilation by the exploding Death Star.
However, to the Stormtrooper’s surprise, a young punk listening to his story informs him that this is a myth: that “the Rebel Fleet intercepted” whatever debris wasn’t vaporized by the blast. In September 2005, the comic book X-Wing: Rogue Leader began its story one week after the Battle of Endor, with a victorious Rebel pilot dousing a fire in an Ewok village that had been ignited by meteoric debris. While this was far from Saxton’s nuclear winter, it showed the destruction of Death Star II did indeed have consequences on the ground.1
The Star Wars franchise is no stranger to genocide (and speciecide, and planetocide). The brutality of the Galactic Empire is demonstrated in A New Hope with the destruction of Leia’s home planet Alderaan; the rise of that same empire is marked in Revenge of the Sith by the near-eradication of the Jedi Order; and many more examples exist in the vast Expanded Universe literature.2 But the Endor Holocaust seems to be the only instance where the genocide is dreamed up outside the story by fans of the franchise. The stop-motion animation show Robot Chicken even depicted the apocryphal apocalypse in gory detail, reveling in the Ewoks’ panicked squeaks. In this one instance, there is a perverse desire to bring scientific realism into a fantasy universe of space wizards and slug gangsters.3
In January 2016, nearly two decades after the fan theory was born, the debate over the Ewoks’ fate was reignited when Tech Insider published a white paper by astrophysicist Dave Minton. The paper detailed how the fragments of Death Star II would have left behind a crater “almost 4 times larger than the Chixculub crater in Mexico that is associated with the dinosaur extinction,” flash-heating every body of water on Endor into steam and rendering the moon a lifeless fireball. Several months later, the official Star Wars Twitter account tried to lay the renewed speculation to rest, claiming the Rebel Alliance fleet had used “shields and tractor beams prevent the Death Star 2’s meteoric debris from devastating Endor’s forest moon.”4
The tweet provoked pushback from some fans. One person tweeted, “That’s not my canon,” and then posted a scan from “Apocalypse Endor,” ignoring the comic book’s eventual debunking of the theory. Another fan responded, “They should have let the death star destroy the verminous teddy bears.”5
With what looks like Death Star debris in the saga’s next installment, we may indeed be on the precipice of another explosive retcon. But one thing will likely remain true: some fans just want to watch Endor burn.
- Christian Read, “Apocalypse Endor,” in Star Wars Tales #14 (Milwaukee: Dark Horse Comics, 2002); Haden Blackman, X-Wing: Rogue Leader #1 (Milwaukee: Dark Horse Comics, 2005).
- For example, see John Ostrander, Star Wars: Legacy #22 (Milwaukee: Dark Horse Comics, 2008); and Troy Denning, Dark Nest I: The Joiner King (New York: Ballantine Books, 2005), 174.
- “Robot Chicken: Star Wars Episode II,” Robot Chicken, Nov. 16, 2008, released as a standalone DVD in 2009.
- Dave Mosher, “A physicist just wrote a paper on why destroying the Death Star would have wiped out the Ewoks,” Tech Insider, Dec. 23, 2015 (Minton’s white paper viewable at the above link and also separately here on Scribd); @StarWars tweet, Oct. 25, 2016, 8:15 a.m.
- @Sleestak tweet, Oct. 25, 2016, 10:38 a.m.; @Sleestak tweet, May 22, 2019, 7:48 p.m; @Werewolf_Korra tweet, Oct. 25, 2016, 9:19 a.m. Also see this tweet by @Sam_Noel_Lee, Oct. 25, 2016, 9:27 a.m.
