365 Films A Year!

These four straight-to-video films were compiled from episodes of the animated TV series Ewoks and Droids. The Droids films (Pirates and Treasure) work the best because Droids had story arcs and these movies basically represent cut down and reworked versions of two of the storylines. (There was also an honest-to-goodness Droids TV movie, The Great Heep, that I will be watching later.) Ewoks, on the other hand did not have these kinds of extended storylines. That being said, Haunted Village does use several related episodes (revolving around the witch Morag), so it holds together better than Tales, which is obviously still episodic in nature.

None of these movies works as well as the original shows. For one thing, the music from the original series have been tossed aside in favor of much more generic and repetitive music. This is particular aggregious in the case of Droids, whose music was originally composed by Stewart Copeland and is some of the best I can remember from 80s cartoon shows.

But the stories are still good and are fun for younger audiences. I understand the desire to package this stuff in a more easily digested format. My only hope is that these compilation films won’t prove to be the only way we can enjoy this material.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 19th, 2009 at 1:45 pm and is filed under 1997, 2004, Animation, Based on TV Show, Drama, Family, Fantasy, Giant Monster, Made for TV, Sci-Fi, Sequel, Straight to Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.