Chicago Tribune

What lurks underneath 'Star Wars” new Chewbacca? A 7-foot-3-inch former basketball player from Finland

CHICAGO - There's too much "Star Wars." A new "Star Wars" movie five months after the previous "Star Wars" movie - whether it's "Solo: A Star Wars Story" or "Kenobi: A Star Wars Story" or "Star Wars: The New Jedi After the Last Jedi" - is too much "Star Wars." I say that as a lifelong, 40-plus-years true believer. Anticipation is as much a part of "Star Wars" as Stormtroopers. Memo to Lucasfilm: Make "Star Wars" a holiday event, a seasonal treat, an annual happening, out of your life long enough to allow us to miss it.

With one exception.

There's never enough Chewbacca.

He is the series' most dependable source of warmth, the shambling, impenetrable, unintelligible leading man who never was - decades before Vin Diesel's Groot came along. Is it wrong to say you welcome Chewie back every time with the same broad smile you welcome your dog? I mean, by the end of the 1970s, there wasn't a suburb in America without at least one German shepherd named Chewbacca. As

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