10 Minor Star Wars Characters Whose Stories Must Be Told
Because the limelight shouldn't just be for Jedi.
The Star Wars saga is on the verge of adding another instalment, with new feature-length bundles of geeknip due every year for the foreseeable future. Every movie in the series has introduced a new clutch of characters, from the celebrated to the maligned, but it is in the details that the series truly shines - in the lesser-known characters without whom the franchise would be but a fraction of what it is.
Star Wars just wouldn't be the same without its gallery of aliens and weirdos crowding the Mos Eisley Cantina, and Jabba's Palace is brought to life by the variety of unsavoury hangers-on among whom the gangster slug holds court.
We've already seen Pondo Baba and Doctor Evazan return for a pre-amputation cameo in Rogue One, and there are literally hundreds of other walk-on parts who could get their turn in the limelight.
When the galactic overlords brainstorm their next standalone movie ideas, let's hope they explore some of these further. Among all these minor characters are fascinating men, women, and alien creatures whose stories would illuminate the darkest corners of the Star Wars galaxy.
10. Wicket The Ewok
At first glance we’re on shaky ground here, because Wicket the Ewok, cutest of the sentient Endorian chipmunks, already has plenty of standalone presence thanks to the Ewoks cartoon series. But that series does not depict the Ewoks of Return of the Jedi, even if hindsight might conflate the two. No, the cinema-going public seems to have forgotten the first thing Star Wars teaches us about the Ewoks.
Ewoks are absolutely. Freaking. Terrifying.
Strangers arrive in their forest, and the Ewoks’ first reaction is to capture them in a net, drag them to their village, and cook them. Cook them while they are alive and conscious, while they are screaming and begging for mercy, and all in the name of their alien god. Wicket's tale unfolds in this horrifying tribal land, as he struggles to choose between being cast out as an exile, or becoming a cannibalistic monster.
Wicket's story is needed to show the horror inherent in Star Wars. Away from the bright lights of Coruscant and the dusty drinking holes of Tattooine, there is another world, a savage and bloodstained world the galaxy's sentient beings have no idea exists.