i agree. I think the original idea was wookies anyway so don’t really know why they went another way. I also don’t think to sell more toys was the right reason, given that the wookies could have been distinct.
The concept Chewbacca was what ended up inspiring Zeb from Rebels:
By the time they got to about the second draft of the screenplay and were making or planning physical representations, they were running into that they could find no way to not make it look awful. So George, when he lifted the
Death Star from the end of his story notes, also took one of the sasquatch-like aliens the Empire was using as slave labor to build it. They were called "wookies" at that point, from something in a background-dialogue track recorded for American Graffiti (one of the loopers ad-libbed "Feels like I ran over a wookie") that stuck with George. Kinda like the inspiration for the astromech droid's name came when he was editing American Graffiti, talking about this specific thing with his co-editor, and interrupted himself to ask for the second tape of dialogue for the reel of the film he was working on at the moment. Everything is labeled, in this case the canister bore "REEL 2 DIALOG 2", which, in the verbal shorthand people in these jobs acquire, became "R2D2" when George asked for it. And something went "aha!" in his head.
Anyway.
After Star Wars was a hit, and he had been pushed into doing Star Wars 2, with plans to continue the story further, some of his "borrowing" was going to come due. He solved the earlier use of his ultimate maguffin by... just using a second -- but
bigger! --
Death Star. But the Wookiees (as it was now spelled) were a problem for him. He had spent two films establishing Chewie as an intelligent, tool-using, blaster-shooting, spaceship-flying being. It wouldn't do to now portray his people as primitives. It never occurred to him that, just maybe, if the Empire were keeping them as slaves, they would be denied access to any technology or advanced weapons.
Instead he decided to invert the concept. Instead of being very tall, he made these new aliens very
small. And he inverted the syllables from wook-EE to EE-wook, streamlined, obviously. But I feel the costumes looked a little too fake, like manufactured teddy bears rather than organically-evolved beings. At least the ones that featured prominently needed to have been done to a higher standard. I still would rather they had been the Wookiee workers' children, held hostage by the Empire to force their parents to work and not resist, who had gone a bit Lord of the Flies on their own...
