Yub Nub!

It was an innocent comment . . .

I may have started a tiny little war on a discussion board. We were innocently discussing the impending announcement by Jabba the Lucas that the original Star Wars trilogy was going to be released on DVD. I expressed dismay that they would probably be the lesser, Special Editions that were released and not the original cuts. The reason I was upset by this is that the original cuts of those films are part of the tapestry of my childhood. I have no visceral connection with the Special Editions. I’m a Han shoots first kind of guy.

Someone countered that Lucas was trying to clean up the films, correcting some of the mistakes he made. I agreed and felt that was fine. But that Lucas took it way too far by shooting new scenes and changing the overall tone of several sequences, most notably the aforementioned Han/Greedo moment and some moments in Empire. However, I contended that Lucas saved all of us some trouble by getting rid of the horrid Ewok celebratory song that marred the ending of the trilogy. You know the song.

This site has a recording of how it originally sounded. It’s a big file, and it’s not worth listening to. But if you must . . . You must.

Well, I hit a nerve when I knocked the Yub Nub song. Apparently people liked it. Really, actually liked it. True, the new agey crap that Williams rescored for the Special Edition wasn’t exactly his greatest work. In fact, it wouldn’t even be considered some of John Tesch’s greatest work but . . . well . . . here’s what I told them:

“Okay, I was not knocking the Ewoks themselves. I was knocking the Yub Nub song. I do not have, nor have I ever had, a problem with the Ewoks, either as a plot device or as a species.

”But think about it. You just defeated an evil Galactic Empire, deposed a dictator and turned his most lethal henchman away from the dark side, while also releasing your father from the grips of a decades long, painful internal struggle. One that physically took most of his body and nearly cost him his soul. Billions of people are now free of an oppressive, murderous regime. How do you celebrate?

“Yub Nub.

“Not quite the emotional release we were looking for. I mean, Lando is gently clapping along. Gently. He just took part in destroying a planet smashing weapon. And he's quietly grooving in the corner to Yub Nub?

“John Williams is the master of the heroic theme and all he could come up with was that?”

No one has responded yet. I think I’m being shunned.

It’s almost as if George told John that the little teddy bears won the war and they needed a good teddy bear march. Even Disney in the 1980s would have vomited over the sugary tripe in this song. The people who made the move Savannah Smiles would have said, “Jesus, isn’t that a bit much? Don’t you think you’re going a bit far at the old cutesy cutesy? I mean, sure, we exploited the cuteness of a little girl for the box office good, but . . . Yub Nub?”

It gets worse. After the blockbuster success of Return of the Jedi, Lucas did a wretched TV movie based on the Ewoks. I’ll spare you the details, but it involved orphans on Endor and a diabetic coma. The diabetic coma wasn’t in the movie itself. The movie induced the diabetic coma.

Well, the song was featured there as well. But this time they released the lyrics. That’s like printing the lyrics to the Steam classic “Na Na Hey Hey (Kiss Him Goodbye)”.

But they did, and here they are. With a translation. I believe that this translation vindicates my above rant. Look at how pathetic this celebratory chant is.

Yub nub, eee chop yub nub,
Freedom, we got freedom [Feel inspired yet?],

toe meet toe pee chee keene, g'noop dock fling oh ah.
and now that we can be free, c'mon and celebrate [Kool and the Gang should sue.]

Yah wah, eee chop yah wah,
Power, we got power [Clearly the little rodents didn’t learn anything from the Galactic Empire and are now obsessed with power. Will this power lust lead to an Ewok regime? Lucas was never clear on this.]

toe meet toe pee chee keene, g'noop dock fling oh ah
and now that we can be free, c'mon and celebrate [Repetition is the key to any great pop song. Even Ewok pop.]

Coat ee chah tu yub nub,
Celebrate the freedom [Be thankful our forefathers didn’t have their song writers, otherwise we may be singing this crap on the Fourth of July.]

Coat ee chah tu yah wah,
Celebrate the power [Oh yes. I feel the power. And it feels good. Let’s eviscerate Skywalker.]

Coat ee chah tu glo wah.
Celebrate the glory [For thine is the power and the glory . . . yep. Stole this from a Catholic mass.]

allay loo ta nuv
celebrate the love [Oh dear God, no.]

Glo wah, eee chop glo wah, ya glo wah pee chu nee foam,
Power, we got power, and now that we can be free [I think we got the point.]

ah toot dee awe goon daa.
it's time to celebrate [Celebrate Good Times, C’mon!]

Coat ee cha tu goo (Yub nub!)
Celebrate the light (Freedom!) [No, reading this in the original Ewok, I’m pretty sure that it told me to celebrate the goo.]

coat ee cha tu doo (Yah wah!)
celebrate the might (Power!) [Again with the power. What was the Ewoks’ true motivation here?]

coat ee cha tu too (ya chaa!)
celebrate the fight (Glory!) [Now we’re learning something. Celebrate the fight. The Ewoks truly were a warlike culture. They weren’t cute and cuddly at all. Don’t turn your back on them, they may hack you off at the knees.]

allay loo tu nuv (3 times)
celebrate the love [Three times? Wasn’t once enough?]

Glo wah, eee chop glo wah.
Glory, we found glory

Ya glow wah pee chu nee foam,
The power showed us the light [The power showed us the light. Really. They’re starting to worry me. They started off cute and now they’re going all Lord of the Flies on us. And, honestly, no matter what language you speak, “Wah pee chu nee foam” is a sexual fetish.]

ah toot dee awe goon daa
and now we all live free [Except, of course, those of us who actually have to hear this song]

allay loo tu nuv.
celebrate the love [Insert waka chaka music here.]

I rest my case. I don’t care how big of a Star Wars fan you are, this song is crap and deserved to be purged from human thought.

But it won’t. Millennia from now, when the alien anthropologists arrive to study our long dead race, they’ll find a CD of this song and somehow deduce that this was the basis of our culture.

“No wonder they died,” one of them will conclude. “With music like this they probably longed for the great silence of death.”

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