Chewbacca

Chewbacca is a two meter tall Wookiee with ginger-brown fur. Born on the planet Kashyyyk some 150 years before Episode One and 200 years before the Battle of Yavin.

Chewbacca fought in the Clone Wars against the droid army of the Separatists who were trying to take over Kashyyyk. He liasoned with Yoda during the final battle and acted as his bodyguard and guide on Kashyyyk. When the Clone troopers turned against the Jedi Master per Order 66 Chewbacca was there to help save the wisest of the Jedi. Chewie was taken prisoner in a slave raid by the Empire sometime after the clone wars. The Empire favored wookies for slaves due to their brute strength. Chewbacca apparently escaped slavery and became a pirate working to free other Imperial slaves. He was recaptured and this is when he met a young Imperial TIE Fighter pilot named Han Solo. Solo freed Chewie from slaver and became a trator to the Empire, abandoning the Imperial military and going ont he run with Chewbacca who swore a life debt oath to Han. They became smugglers and Chewbacca became his partner in crime, co-pilot and chief mechanic. Soon, they won the freighter Millennium Falcon, from Lando Calrissian and they became one of the top smugglers for Jabba The Hutt.

Chewbacca is married to a female Wookiee named Mallatobuck and they have a son Lumpawarrump together. Despite his family life Chewie continued his flying with Han as the Wookiee life debt demanded. Chewbacca's son, was raised mainly by Malla and Chewie's father, Attichitcuk.

Chewbacca´s life changed forever one fateful day at a local Cantina in Mos Eisley, Tatooine when he met the Jedi Knight Obi-Wan Kenobi, who was looking for passage to Alderan. Desperate for cash, Chewie and Han took on the charter. Little did the two smugglers realize that their cargo consisted of a legendary Jedi Knight, the son of the prophesied Chosen One and a pair of droids containing information vital to both the Empire and the Alliance. This trip confirmed Chewie´s rebel tendencies (after being a slave of the Empire this is hardly suprizing), and it is Chewbacca who is credited with turning Solo around and returning climactically to the battle of Yavin to aid Luke Skywalker. After this Chewbacca and Solo continued their work for the Rebellion until it finally defeated the Empire.

Many years later when the galaxy was confronted with a new threat, the invasion of the Yuuzhan Vong Solo and Chewbacca were on the planet of Sernpidal when was targeted. The Yuuzhan Vong began to drag Serpidal's moon of Dobido from its orbit towards the planet's surface. Solo, his son Anakin, and Chewbacca began organizing an evacuation, cramming as many escapees aboard the Falcon as they could. Chewbacca was cut off from the Falcon and rather than endanger everyone aboard, Anakin piloted the ship away, leaving Chewbacca behind. Chewbacca was killed when the immense moon crashed into Sernpidal's surface.

source: www.starwars.com

"Will someone get this big walking carpet out of my way?"
Princess Leia, Star Wars, A New Hope.

Chewbacca, a wookiee from Kashyyyk, is a central character in the Star Wars saga. Inspired by a dog, created by a master and brought to life by a gentle giant-- Chewbacca is one of the most loved characters from the films.

Inspiration

George Lucas’ inspiration for Chewbacca came from his pet dog, Indiana, who also went onto to be the name used for Indiana Jones. His nose is distinctly dog-like and combined with shaggy fur, he has a strange bipedal dog look about him.

Monster Maker

"I thought that hairy beast would be the end of me."
C-3P0, Return of the Jedi.

Stuart Freeborn is the man behind the creation of the Chewie costume. He is a make-up artist but also designed creatures, his introduction to the more hirsute costuming was the Apes in Stanley Kubrick's 2001. He is credited for just make-up in A New Hope but it is well known he is the man behind Yoda and Chewie as well as most of the other creatures that inhabited the Star Wars universe. The techniques used for Chewie were very similar for the 2001 apes.

This information about the actual construction is a little hard to find but I have managed to pull up some sources, as well as using my own knowledge of costume construction.

The suit consisted of a leotard worn underneath to make it easier to get the outer suit on and I suspect to limit the amount of cleaning required of the actual suit. The suit itself was a knitted mohair base with hand knotted yak hair. The technique used is very similar to wig construction, just on a much grander scale. Padding was used across the actor’s shoulder and back to create the bulky silhouette and 10cm/4 inch lifts to create the leg length. The head piece/mask had a high domed skull, adding another 10cm to create the height of 244cm/8 feet that Chewbacca stands.

There is a lot less known about the mask construction. It was a fibreglass skull filled with rigid polyurethane covered with a foam skin, which was lubricated with talc to help it slide convincingly over the skull. The interior of the mask was cast to be a perfect fit for Peter Mayhew, the actor who played Chewbacca. It was attached at various points with toggles to Peter's face allowing facial expressions used by him to be translated into the mask. Freeborn had used similar technology in the Apes from 2001. The only part of Peter that is visible are his distinctive blue eyes, which had black rings painted around them to blend into the mask. Chewie’s teeth and tongue were all part of the mask, making it all the more realistic. The hair on Chewie’s face was inserted to the soft foam one hair at a time with a hypodermic needle, a time-consuming process that produces very realistic results. The costume weighed about 15 to 20 pounds and one can only imagine how hot and confining it was, especially on location in places like Tunisia and California. As part of the latest DVD commentary, Carrie Fisher said Peter was starting to really stink in the Carbonite Chamber in The Empire Strikes Back.

The number of costumes that were made is a subject of conjecture. Some people maintain there was only one suit, with a stunt suit being made for Return of the Jedi. Considering how much film time Chewbacca gets in episodes four, five and six, this seems to be ridiculous. The wear and tear on the costume would be too great. It is also documented that the costume had a tendency to shed, especially in hot weather, so logic says that there most likely would have been at least two costumes. This would have allowed for repair and maintenance while filming and allowed for mishaps. More than this, you would have to look at budget and time constraints, the construction of such a costume would have to be measured in hundreds of hours. It could be speculated that there may have been only one costume made for A New Hope but with an expanded budget, there were more made for subsequent movies.

A new Chewbacca costume was constructed for Revenge of the Sith using the original suit as a comparison- the surviving suit was not up to the rigors of filming. The creature-making team of Lou and Dave Elsey constructed this creature with the goal for Chewie to be completely recognisable in a crowd of Wookiees. They used similar techniques as Stuart Freeborn the ones had pioneered many years before, although they did not use yak hair rather it was “made of modern, more versatile and durable materials”, most likely to be a synthetic type of hair, not fur. The designers were most concerned that Peter Mayhew was comfortable in the new Chewbacca and both mention the enormous satisfaction they felt when Peter gave the thumbs up for the revamped Chewie.

The Growls

"Laugh it up, fuzzball."
Han Solo, A New Hope

The voice of Chewbacca was initially was just Peter Mayhew growling through the mask, giving cues to the other actors until Ben Burtt, a sound designer, raided his sound library to construct those sounds we know so well. Using a variety of animals including; walruses, camels, bears and badgers, Burtt blended them and moulded them to produce a distinctive sound. One of the more important voices was that of Tarik, a black bear from the Happy Hollow Zoo in San Jose, California. Tarik died in 1994 due to congestive heart failure.

Gentle Giant

"I'm terribly sorry about all this. After all, he's only a Wookiee."
C-3P0, Empire Strikes Back

Peter Mayhew is the man who made Chewbacca a believable creature. Born in Barnes in England, Peter stands an astounding 233cm/7 feet 4 inches tall. This height is the reason the hospital worker became the Minotaur in Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger. Once David Prowse decided he would prefer to be Darth Vader, Peter was approached to play Chewbacca.

Peter has made Chewie his own. Before the filming began of the first trilogy, Peter studied the walks and movements of bears, monkeys, gorillas and other animals at zoos to give Chewie his non-human movement nuances. One story is that he was ill during the filming of The Empire Strikes Back and another tall actor was called upon to play Chewie. These shots had to be discarded, as it became clear that Peter’s hard work was nigh on impossible to copy.

Photos of Peter do show disconcerting similarities to the lovable furball. Peter has played Chewie in all of his Star Wars appearances, as well as receiving a MTV Movies Lifetime Achievement award that was presented to the walking carpet.

Peter now does the Science Fiction Convention circuit, attending with "Men Behind the Masks", a group which also includes David Prowse, Kenny Baker, and Jeremy Bulloch.

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http://www.starwars.com/
http://www.rebellegion.com/chewie/chewie.asp
http://www.petermayhew.com/
http://www.starwars.com/databank/character/chewbacca/?id=bts
http://1001resources.com/hosting/users/cinesecrets/StuFreeborn/index.html

Recently, your friend Behr was reading the news on a reliable news site when he saw a photograph off to the right. Now, these photographs and sayings you see on the right side of the page (or elsewhere) are what the kids are calling "links" which take you to other reliable sites. This one took me to a site that showed a larger version of the photograph, in which you can clearly see a creature like Chewbacca, a character from the film Star Wars which was popular in the late 1970s. So, most young people will probably not recognize Chewbacca in this photograph because they were not exposed to the film, so it falls on your elders to explain things to you due to how many avocados you insist on eating.

In the photograph we can clearly see Chewbacca with his military-style belt across his chest (which could be either ammunition or chocolate bars) is walking through some dense woods. This means there is proof that Chewbacca is HERE on our planet and not on his own or flying around with Handyman Solo. So what can we do with this information? We can take it to the people in power and demand results. Someone needs to be out there in the woods looking for this character. Photographs do not lie and they give incontrovertible proof that something has happened. You cannot manipulate a photograph because of the process used in film development and the chemicals involved.

If Chewbacca is here (on our planet) as the photograph clearly shows then why isn't anyone doing anything? People are sitting on their hands and not doing a goddamn thing. The reason is clear, as explained in a news article on one of the reliable news websites I visit. It is because if the government were to track down Chewbacca in the woods and bring him in for questioning and a good old-fashioned beat down by the cops. I love when they smash the fucking criminal's face into a table in the interview room and call him names. That is good stuff. They can do that with Chewbacca before proving that he is up to no good.

In the case of Chewbacca the thing of it is is that if the government brings him in (as described above when I lost my train of thought) they will then have proof of the existence of God and people will have to get off social security and return to God because he will be proven to exist by the discovery of Chewbacca (which therefore proves science wrong). The government doesn't want to do this because then people will be in church and not on welfare and the Deep State needs to keep us relying on the government rather than God.

This matter involving Chewbacca is the most frustrating for those of us who are devoted to a certain way of thinking. We want that proof revealed and to see all the memos written by people in our slavish government that won't let us run sketchy businesses for more than three years before shutting us down. All this needs to be out there in the public record. Even if you weren't around in 1977 and don't know who Chewbacca is you deserve to know the truth about God and what it means when Chewbacca is seen on planet Earth (where we live).

My friend Chopper was asking me the other day (after I explained all this to him and showed him the photograph on the internet) how this proves the existence of God. I had to explain to him (because he's done a lot of crystal meth and gotten into a lot of bar fights) that if Chewbacca can come and go from planet Earth (where we live), which is not possible unless there is a God moving him around the universe (scientists as usual have no answers - always wearing their lab coats and shrugging like the losers they are). How can he go from being in what is explained to us in the movie Star Wars as being in a time and galaxy (cluster of stars) far, far away. Maybe a spaceship can travel in space but it cannot travel in time. There is no such thing as a "time ship" (something my friend The Slow Kid asked me about) so that is right out.

Someone from a place and a TIME that is different than us cannot come and go as they please in our time and place. This was hard for Chopper and The Slow Kid to grasp so I hope it will be easier for you because I am bald and old and am a paid columnist for this newspaper. I have my facts straight all the time. You have to be on top of things when you are a paid columnist for a newspaper. The Slow Kid also keeps thinking I am saying that I am a "communist" when I talk about this so you can see how confused he is.

Let us summarize. Is there a photograph of Chewbacca walking around in the woods on planet Earth? Yes. Are photographs from reliable news sites and their affiliates reliable as proof that something is true? Yes. Am I a communist? No. Is the Deep State trying to prevent us from seeing proof of God? Without a doubt.

Take action. Take to the streets and start absolutely shouting about these matters (no need to mention that I am not a communist - that isn't for general consumption).