R2 is to be expected.
“Nub nub” chattering teddy bears besting battle hardened elite troops is “another thing entirely”, GL had to have tossed it in at the last minute.
It seemed so haphazard and ill designed.
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LvswNDAAZCU
Troops by Kevin Rubio.
One of the voices heard is the voice actor for one of the Animaniacs characters.
Well, the Ewoks were an outgrowth of an original idea he had before the first movie was made to have a low-tech Wookiee planet fight the Empire. He said this was inspired by the guerrilla warfare in Vietnam (Lucas was set to direct Apocalypse Now at one point, so he probably had ideas for Vietnam-style battle scenes floating around in his head). The brief Wookiee battle seen in Revenge of the Sith brought some of that to life eventually, but the Wookiees were more high-tech, in keeping with the idea that Chewbacca could pilot the Millennium Falcon. Lucas had no budget for that kind of thing in the first movie so Chewbacca became the only Wookiee and he had to become high-tech to be a copilot for Han. For Return of the Jedi he resurrected the idea of a furry species fighting the Empire, but he said he didn’t use Wookiees because he wanted this species to be low-tech. Why they ended up as teddy bear-type characters, was almost certainly with an eye towards merchandising the characters. Although my understanding was the Ewok merchandise never sold as well as he hoped. I know that when I was a kid, we liked collecting the action figures, but at that age, as boys we were not particularly excited about buying larger fuzzy teddy bears.