The Ring, the Witch, and the Crystal: An Ewok Adventure

The Ring, the Witch, and the Crystal

Author: Cathy East Dubowski

Illustrator: Toni Scribner

Medium: Picture book

Publication Date: June 1986

Timeline Placement: 3 ABY

 

A 33-page picture-book retelling of Ewoks: The Battle for Endor, a 94-minute made-for-TV movie. Needless to say, the story feels a little compressed.

The first page is spent recapping the events of the previous film, The Ewok Adventure. The second page then immediately undoes those events by recapping the opening minutes of The Battle for Endor, in which almost the entire cast of the first film dies on-screen. All the Ewoks are taken prisoner by the frightening Marauders, except for Wicket who escapes with a newly orphaned little girl named Cindel Towani.

The two friends meet a Teek named Teek, who takes them to meet his friend Wilford "Diabeetus" Brimley, an old man whose star cruiser crashed on Endor decades ago. He has been rebuilding his ship but without a crystal oscillator it will never fly again.

Meanwhile, King Terak, the ruler of the Marauders, has stolen the crystal oscillator from the Towanis' crashed spaceship and is seeking to unlock its mystic powers. His court witch, Charal (later retconned in The Illustrated Star Wars Universe to be a Dathomiri Nightsister), suggests that Cindel has the power to activate the crystal, so she turns into a raven and flies off to find her. 

 

Taking the form of Jadis the White Witch, Charal lures Cindel away and brings her back to Terak, who throws her in the dungeon when she has no idea what he's talking about. There, she is reunited with the captured Ewoks. Wilford Brimley, Wicket, and Teek come to the rescue, freeing Cindel and all the Ewoks, but the Marauders come after them, riding blurrgs into battle, although the book comically refers to them as "dinosaurs." 

Scene from The Valley of the Gwangi.

A great battle ensues where the Ewoks put into practice all the tricks they'll use against the Empire in Return of the Jedi, but in the end it comes down to a one-on-one battle: an elderly obese diabetic versus a terrifying giant monster man. Wilford Brimley hits King Terak a few times with his stick, which Terak promptly cleaves in twain with his sword. Before he can strike the final blow, however, Wicket throws a rock at him, shattering Charal's magic ring which he is wearing around his neck. The book gruesomely describes shards of the ring being driven into Terak's heart, then he turns into stone and Charal becomes a nothlit.

Wilford Brimley and Cindel leave Endor aboard Noa's star cruiser, leaving Wicket and Teek behind, but they know that no matter how much distance separates them, they will always be friends.

The art in this book is quite nice, reverting to a more realistic style similar to the earlier batch of Ewok books, though it feels a bit out of place after the previous few books used the character designs and art style from the animated series. This drastically abbreviated version of the story isn't terrible, but there's absolutely no reason to read this over watching the full film. The two live-action Ewoks movies get a bad rap, but The Battle for Endor is a pretty decent '80s children's dark fantasy, George Lucas's answer to The Dark Crystal, Return to Oz, The NeverEnding Story, and Labyrinth, although obviously not as good as any of those.