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Like It Or Lumpy It: Chewbacca's Son Is Officially In Star Wars Canon

No, Lumpy isn't actually Supreme Leader Snoke, but he has made himself into official Star Wars canon, somehow!

By Tom ChapmanPublished 6 years ago 3 min read
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'Star Wars Holiday Special' [Credit CBS]

You can say what you want about the Star Wars Holiday Special, but it has certainly given us something to talk about over the past 39 years: Carrie Fisher singing carols, a sympathetic (but still largely silent) Boba Fett, and a segment of meet the Wookiees that now looks like it has been plucked from Harry and the Hendersons.

Appearing in five of the eight #StarWars films, #PeterMayhew's Chewie has become as much a part of the franchise as his partner in crime #HanSolo. However, where Han got to canoodle with princesses and flesh out his story with buddy Lando, we still know relatively little about our purring Wookiee. With all the best intentions to give Chewie a life outside the Falcon, one of the laughable parts of the Star Wars Holiday Special was the introduction of Chewie's son Lumpawaroo, a.k.a. Lumpy, with his L'Oréal hair and gormless face.

With #Disney retconning the events outside a select few novels, everyone had assumed that the Star Wars Holiday Special (and therefore Chewie's family) had gone the way of the first Death Star, taken a proton torpedo to its exhaust pipe, and was to be forever forgotten, as it deserves. But now there's been a disturbance in the Force, and we have some bad news for you: No, Lumpy isn't actually Supreme Leader Snoke (although cue fan theories), but he has made himself into official Star Wars canon, somehow!

Chew gotta be kidding me.

'Star Wars Holiday Special' [Credit: CBS]

Why now is anyone's guess, but thanks to the work of Chuck Wendig's novel Aftermath: Empire’s End, the Lucasverse has cleared up a few things. The final part of Wendig's Aftermath trilogy, gave us the tragic/hoped for tumble of Jar Jar Binks after he inadvertently handed the galaxy to the Empire, and has also filled in a few other blank spaces. For example, it has given us a #Chewbacca backstory that we never knew we needed, but is presumably there to set him up for his role in the upcoming Han Solo: A Star Wars Story.

Chewie having relatives on Kashyyyk has been hinted to outside of the Holiday Special, particularly in Wendig's second novel, titled Life Debt, however, Empire's End takes it one step further. The latest passage has a Wookiee Lumpawaroo (Waroo) saving some junior fuzzballs from a child labor camp and trying to eradicate any traces of the Empire from the Wookiee homeworld. It seems that Imperial Officer Dessard wants to turn Lumpy into his very own living room throw, but before he can deliver the final blow, Waroo is rescued by a strike team that consists of his father, Chewbacca!

The passage goes all mushy as the pair have a touching father-son reunion and “sing a song of family," similar to those chanting Ewoks at the end of Return of the Jedi. While we shouldn't expect the next #StarWars Anthology to follow suit, it is a safe bet that there will at least be a hint to the rest of the Chew crew at some point during the film's runtime.

A Lump In The Road

[Credit: Disney]

Fans of the films will know that we have already visited the planet Kashyyyk during Revenge of the Sith, but with all the Wookiees looking like fully-grown adults, we have no idea what a child Wookiee is supposed to look like — hopefully not like the Cousin It-inspired characters we got in Holiday Special.

Note that Wookiees can live to be over 200 years old and it is unknown when Chewie got down and dirty with Mrs. Chewie, but Lumpy's proposed birth was one year before the Battle of Yavin, meaning that unless his age is changed, it is unlikely that Lumpy would feature in a young Han Solo solo film. Wendig is certainly giving enough trails of plot threads for Phil Lord and Chris Miller to pick up in their spin-off film, and it is highly likely that the exploration of Chewie and Han's relationship will involve some form of a family tree with walking furballs — let's see if the animatronic Wookiee puppets have had an upgrade since 1978.

Han Solo: A Star Wars Story is officially underway with Alden Ehrenreich as Han, Donald Glover as a young Lando Calrissian, and Joonas Suotamo stepping into Mayhew's big furry slippers as Chewie. Slated for a May 25, 2018 release, maybe we will learn a bit more about Han and Chewie's bromance and finally find out how the smuggler learned how to speak such impeccable Wookiee tongue!

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About the Creator

Tom Chapman

Tom is a Manchester-based writer with square eyes and the love of a good pun. Raised on a diet of Jurassic Park, this ’90s boy has VHS flowing in his blood. No topic is too big for this freelancer by day, crime-fighting vigilante by night.

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