“Touch Me”: Fuzzy as an Ewok: Things to Touch, See, and Smell from the Forest Moon of Endor

Fuzzy as an Ewok

Author: Virginia Holt

Illustrator: Deborah Colvin Borgo

Medium: Picture book

Publication Date: April 1986

Timeline Placement: 1 ABY

 

The Ewoks are preparing for yet another of their many holidays: the Festival of Wisties. And this one is every Ewok's favorite! Logray sends Wicket and Kneesaa on a mission to do his shopping for him so he has everything he needs to prepare for the festival. They must retrieve a fuzzy fungus from the trunk of a brillibab tree (to make the bonfire burn brightly), a pink feather from the wing of a lantern bird, a lumpy bumpy gwanda gourd, four starchains from the lake, and a bushel of ripe rainbow berries for the big Wistie Fest pie. "The only way to tell if they're ready to pick is to scratch and sniff them." Naturally.

The young Ewoks successfully acquire all of these items. Thanks to their hard work, Chief Chirpa, who is now wearing the lantern bird's feather in his headdress, remarks, "This is the best Wistie Fest ever!" Wicket rattles the gwanda gourd beneath the decorative starchains hung from the tree branches overhead, while his mother presents Kneesaa with the newly baked rainbow berry pie in front of the bonfire. All of our hard work scratching and sniffing has finally paid off.

We still have three Ewoks books left to go, but all of them are adaptations of other media. Sadly, Fuzzy as an Ewok is the last Ewok picture book with an original story. While It’s true that most Ewoks media is targeted at a very young audience, what I’ve liked about these books so far, and what continues in the animated series, live-action films, comics, and short stories that we haven’t even touched on yet, is how they build up an entire self-contained world within the larger setting of the Star Wars galaxy. While there’s little narrative overlap, recurring environmental elements help build a consistent feel to Endor, even while the circumstances of each plot can vary wildly and feature a wide range of off-the-wall supernatural entities and phenomena. The Ewoks sub-franchise is like a less boring version of Lost Tribe of the Sith.