George Lucas wanted the Star Wars cartoon droids to be Eddie Murphy

By James On Jul 20, 2024

In the late 1970s, Michael Hirsh seized an opportunity. An experimental filmmaker whose love of art (and occasional LSD trips) led him to animation, Hirsh eventually turned his passion into a business, producing independent features and short films that caught the attention of the industry. And one eye would change his life: George Lucas. In 1978, Lucas hired Hirsh and his company Nelvana to produce an animated short for the upcoming Star Wars Holiday Special on CBS. The special may have been legendarily bad, but Hirsh delivered the best part, an animated introduction to Boba Fett, and began an inscrutable career producing everything from Inspector Gadget, Beetle juice (the series), Babar, The Adventures of Tintin, The Care Bears MovieAnd The Magic School Bus.

Hirsh would even work with Lucas a second time, bringing about the Saturday Morning Cartoon-ification 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 challenging process of working with Lucas at a time when Nelvana needed a financial win, figuring out who the Star Wars droids would be without Luke Skywalker, and the bizarre story behind the Ewoks’ theme song.

Around this time I got another surprise phone call from Lucasfilm saying they had sold two animated films. Star Wars ABC Network spin-offs: Droidsabout the adventures of R2D2 and C3PO, and Ewoksabout the fierce but lovable creatures that lived on the planet Endor. The shows were part of George Lucas’ plan to boost the merchandising business for Star Wars for lack of new Star Wars movies. Each series was designed so that any three or four episodes could be combined into made-for-video movies. I was surprised that George didn’t want Darth Vader, Luke, Leia, or Hans to appear in the shows, but we did get permission to use some of the Star Wars theme music.

Nelvana produced both shows, storyboarding and layouting them in Toronto and then animating them overseas. We did Droids in Korea with Steven Hahn and Ewoks in Taiwan with James Wang. A lot of blood, sweat and tears went into the making of the shows, but neither series scored well. Droids lasted only one season and Ewoks two. I think one of the problems we ran into was that Saturday Morning Network TV had too many restrictions on violence. We couldn’t show anything that kids could imitate, so our weapons were more like vacuum cleaners or channel changers than Star Wars weapons. While the Ewoks in the movie were cute, they were also warriors, and that tension got in the way of making it a successful children’s show. The plan to create multi-part episodes also became a challenge because ABC standards and practices prohibited children’s programming from ending episodes on cliffhangers. We had to design each episode to be complete on its own. Cable television, which was not bound by FCC regulations, would be a better home for later Star Wars spin-offs such as The Clone Wars.

One of the interesting aspects of both series, but especially Droids, was George’s love of deep background 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 Star Wars. Ewoks was relatively simple as it was largely inspired by the world of Endor in Return of the JediBut Droids was intended to have new main characters every four episodes, with R2D2 and C3PO as the only continuing characters. George also kept changing his mind about whether he wanted it to be more comedic or more action-adventure. The two main droids were the Laurel and Hardy of the Star Wars saga, but sometimes George wanted them to look like Yosemite Sam or other Warner Bros. cartoon stars, and sometimes he wanted them to look like Eddie Murphy Beverly Hills Agent. We never found the right direction for the series.

While Ewoks smoother, it presented one of the most difficult production issues I have ever encountered. George had chosen singer/songwriter Taj Mahal to write and sing the theme song for the series. The demo he delivered was pretty rough. With only a week to go until the air date, I went to Hawaii to attend his recording session for the final version and Taj was nowhere to be found. The engineer directed us to a local hotel lounge where we were able to recruit a couple of singers to sweeten the demo track with new vocals. We were recording them when Taj Mahal casually walked into the studio. Luckily, he liked what we were doing and re-recorded his lead vocal. Despite all this, ABC never liked the theme song and ordered a completely different song for season two.

While we were working on the Star Wars shows, George introduced me to John Lasseter, head of Lucasfilm’s fledgling CGI production division that would later become known as Pixar when it was later sold to Apple. George had wanted to use computer animation for Droids And EwoksThe technology wasn’t there yet, but John was on the critical path to building it, and he was working on the animation side with Ed Catmull, who was more focused on the software and technology side. At that time, this type of computer processing required large mainframe computers that could fill a room. We didn’t really 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 filming to Asia, starting with Inspector Gadget was that in North America and Europe the cost of painting an episode was the same as the cost of animating that episode. In the 1990s, computer-controlled painting systems allowed us to repatriate that work and earn Canadian tax credits by doing it in-house.

Don’t feel sorry for Hirsh – after Droids And Ewoks, the producer continued making The Care Bears Moviewhich in 1985 became the most successful non-Disney animated film of its time. And there were many shows before him. For more anecdotes from inside the cartoon boom of the 90s, check out Animation Nation: How We Built a Cartoon Empire.