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When George Lucas created the first Star Wars film, nobody had any idea just what it would become. The movie was unlike anything that anybody had really tried to do, and so it's maybe not that surprising that the confidence in the project was something less than 100%. The first Star Wars, now known as A New Hope, went through a lot of changes during production. And now Mark Hamill has revealed some wild ideas for Chewbacca.
It turns out Chewie almost got some fancy pants, as Mark Hamill recently revealed that there was much hand-wringing during pre-production about the fact that Chewbacca was (gasp!) naked. While sharing some images of early Chewbacca concept art that includes him wearing more clothes than he ended up in, Hamill says that studio executives actually tried to put him in lederhosen, because they were concerned that the Wookie was wearing basically nothing.
Yes, Chewbacca is wearing a bandolier of unknown purpose and literally nothing else, but the character never feels like he's naked. And yet, that was apparently one of the big concerns during the early days of the first Star Wars. It seems that everybody involved in the film to be more humorous than anything else. And that's not too surprising. As mentioned, nobody really had any clue whether Star Wars was going to work at all, and for that reason there were probably a lot more worries about things seen as a lot more important.
What's actually really unclear here is exactly how Chewbacca escaped without more clothing. Honestly, this concept art doesn't look too bad, and while it's certainly not the character we know, if this is what we'd been given fans wouldn't know the difference. And considering just how unimportant it is whether or not Chewbacca had clothes, it could have been just as easy, if not easier, to just give in and let Chewbacca wear clothing so that everybody involved could focus on more important things.
Chewbacca's time in the MCU is available on Disney+. You can use this link to sign up for the streaming service.
In the end, the success of Star Wars had nothing to do with Chewbacca's outfit, I mean, probably. I suppose it could be that if everybody thought Chewbacca looked silly in lederhosen it could have ruined everything and the movie could have flopped. And to be fair, if we got the design of Chewbacca that we ended up with, but he was also wearing lederhosen, that would probably look pretty ridiculous. Though I'm sure they would have been cool space lederhosen.
In the end we got naked Chewbacca, and it didn't seem to bother anybody. His look has become as iconic as any other part of the galaxy far, far, away, and despite not wearing clothes, or even being able to speak, Chewbacca is one of the most popular characters in the franchise.
