Wookiees: Kashyyyk, Biology and Why Chewbacca Never Got a Medal

George Lucas built the Wookiee from his dog. Indiana, an Alaskan malamute, rode in the passenger seat of his car in the early 1970s, and Lucas has said he wanted a co-pilot for his smuggler with the same shaggy, loyal, slightly alarming presence; the name came, by his account, from a line an actor improvised in his first film, THX 1138. Ralph McQuarrie's concept paintings gave the creature a lemur's face and then a dog's, and Stuart Freeborn's costume, worn by the 7-foot-3 Peter Mayhew, gave it the face the films kept. Kashyyyk, the home world, was named in the 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special, which spent an hour with Chewbacca's family in a treehouse and which Lucas has spent the decades since trying to forget. The planet reached the live-action screen in Revenge of the Sith (2005), as a world of lagoons and kilometres-high wroshyr trees defended by Wookiee catamarans.

Wookiee society, as the films and the animated series show it, is arboreal, clan-based and honour-bound. Cities occupy the canopy; families occupy single vast trees; and the wroshyr's intertwined branches, which fuse where they touch, are the species' image of itself. The Empire, after the Clone Wars, enslaved the population as labour, an occupation shown in Solo and Rebels and referred to in the sequels, and Chewbacca's history as a prisoner and a fugitive is the reason a Wookiee is flying a Corellian freighter for a human at all.

A Wookiee stands well over two metres, covered in fur that runs from brown to black to the occasional white, with a heavy frame, retractable claws in the fingers used for climbing, and a strength the films demonstrate by having Chewbacca lift grown men and, in The Empire Strikes Back, carry a disassembled droid on his back through a battle. The claws are for trees only: the tie-in material describes a taboo against using them in a fight, and a Wookiee who does is shunned as a "madclaw." Lifespans run to about 400 years, so Chewbacca, roughly 200 in the original films, is at midlife when he meets Han Solo. The species' language, Shyriiwook, is a set of roars, growls and moans that other species can learn to understand but not to speak; Ben Burtt built Chewbacca's voice from recordings of bears, walruses, lions, badgers and a dying camel, mixed by sentence.

The life debt is the species' best-known custom and the one the canon has revised most. In the older novels a Wookiee whose life is saved binds himself to the saver for life, and Chewbacca's debt to Han, who freed him from Imperial slavery, explains the partnership. Solo (2018) kept the rescue, Han freeing a starving Chewbacca from a mud pit where the Empire kept him as a punishment for deserters, and dropped the formal debt; the two simply choose each other. It is the same story with the paperwork removed.

Peter Mayhew was a hospital orderly in London when a producer noticed his height, and he played the character in five films from 1977 to 2015 before handing the costume to Joonas Suotamo, a Finnish former basketball player two inches shorter. Mayhew's performance was in the head: the tilt that reads as doubt, the shrug that reads as apology, the way the character listens. Lucas kept the dog in the story too. A creature who cannot speak, is devoted to one person and is dangerous to everyone else is a dog written as a person, and the films give Chewbacca a dog's emotional range, from the bellow when Han is frozen to the collapse when he dies.

The medal is the character's longest-running joke. The award ceremony that closes the 1977 film gives Luke and Han medals and gives Chewbacca a roar, and the omission was noticed at once; Lucas offered various explanations over the years, none in the films, and Carrie Fisher told a 1997 convention that Chewbacca had not received one because he was too tall for her to reach. MTV gave Mayhew a lifetime achievement award in 1997, presented by Fisher, as a medal; The Rise of Skywalker (2019) closed the matter in canon with Maz Kanata presenting Chewbacca with Han's medal after the Battle of Exegol. The scene was written after Mayhew's death in April 2019, and the film is dedicated to him.

Ufology had hairy giants before Kashyyyk did. The guide to reported alien types lists the "hairy dwarfs" of the 1954 South American wave, small, fur-covered beings with claws that a Venezuelan man named Gustavo Gonzalez said attacked him in Caracas that November, and the 1973 Pennsylvania flap, in which witnesses in Westmoreland County reported a landed light and tall, hair-covered figures with glowing eyes on the same nights, a case that joined the UFO and Bigfoot literatures for good. Chewbacca postdates both, and there is no evidence Lucas knew of either; his source was a dog and a lemur. But the fur-covered giant beside a craft was already an image ufology owned by 1977, and the film gave it a heart.

The Wookiee's other contribution to the culture is the Millennium Falcon, which he co-pilots and mostly repairs, and the ship's claim to have made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs. A parsec measures distance, not time, which fans noticed in 1977 and the canon resolved decades later by making the run a shorter route through a hazard; the warp drive science article covers what faster-than-light travel would actually require. The best alien movies list places the original film among the works that fixed what an alien co-pilot looks like.