The producer of Droids, Ewoks on why the early Star Wars cartoons flopped

polygon.com:

In the late-1970s, Michael Hirsh seized an opportunity. An experimental filmmaker whose love of art (and occasional LSD trips) drove him to animation, Hirsh eventually turned his passion into a business, producing independent feature films and shorts that caught the eye of the industry. And one eye would change his life: George Lucas. In 1978, Lucas hired Hirsh and his company Nelvana to produce an animated short for the upcoming Star Wars Holiday Specialon CBS. The special may have been legendarily bad, but Hirsh delivered the best part, an animated introduction to Boba Fett, and kicked off an unfathomable career, having produced everything from Inspector Gadget, Beetlejuice(the series), Babar, The Adventures of Tintin, The Care Bears Movie, and The Magic School Bus.

Hirsh would even work with Lucas again a second time, establishing the Saturday Morning Cartoon-ification of Star Wars in the form of two series: Ewoksand Droids. In this exclusive excerpt from Hirsh’s memoir Animation Nation: How We Built a Cartoon Empire, the producer explains the challenging process of working with Lucas at a time when Nelvana needed a financial win, figuring out who Star Wars’ droids would be without Luke Skywalker around, and the bizarre tale of Ewoks’ theme song.

Around this time, I got another surprise call from Lucasfilm telling me that they had sold two animated Star Wars spinoffs to the ABC network: Droids, about the adventures of R2D2 and C3PO, and Ewoks, about the fierce but lovable creatures who lived on the planet Endor. The shows were part of George Lucas’s plan to maintain the merchandising business for Star Wars in the absence of new Star Wars movies. Each series was conceived so that every three or four episodes could be combined into made-for-video movies. I was surprised to find that George didn’t want Darth Vader, Luke, Leia or Hans to appear in the shows, but we did get permission to use some of the Star Wars theme music.

Nelvana produced both shows, making the