Han Solo Was Chewbacca In Original Star Wars Vision By George Lucas

That’s because Lucas wanted Han Solo to function as the alien sidekick to the other characters in his galaxy far, far away, and the actual Chewbacca character played a more minor role.

How, exactly, was Han Solo supposed to be the version of Chewbacca in the earliest drafts of Star Wars? First of all, he wasn’t going to be human.

Rather than appearing as a handsome Corellian smuggler, Han was instead going to be a big green alien, someone who looked a lot more like the monstrous DC hero Swamp Thing rather than Harrison Ford.

Weirdly enough, though, the Corellian heritage–or a form of it, at least–was still present in these early drafts.

Han Solo was going to be a Yourellian (sometimes spelled as Urellian or Ureallian), and his people weren’t very friendly to Chewbacca’s people.

In a rough draft of the first Star Wars film, some of these aliens were trappers who tried to capture Chewie and other Wookies.

At any rate, the Han Solo character evolved quite a bit over time, and after he was made into a human, he was referred to as a Corellian (sometimes spelled as Korellian).

Incidentally, some who have read the early rough draft that Lucas wrote (or maybe read the later comic book adaptation of it, printed as The Star Wars) might dispute my claim that Han Solo was meant to be Chewbacca because the famous Wookie does make an appearance in the story.

He has a smaller role, though, as someone who gets rescued by our heroes and then brings them to the safety of his tribe (which is on Yavin and not Kashyyyk).

Later, he blends in a bit more: rather than being the only Wookie during this adventure, he is part of an entire tribe that later helps our heroes attack an Imperial base.

As for Han Solo, he functioned as the kind of alien sidekick that Chewbacca would later become. In an ironic twist, the Han of this draft was specifically a sidekick to Luke Skywalker, who is an elderly general rather than a wide-eyed youth.

Solo was already written into this script as an old friend of General Skywalker’s, but Lucas ended up changing him into a human to help make Han’s relationship with other characters more distinct.

To understand why George Lucas wanted Han Solo to be a little less like Chewbacca in later scripts, all you have to do is look at the famous Wookie’s portrayal in the Original Trilogy.

Sure, Chewie gets some very memorable moments, but his alien nature automatically sets him apart from other characters, setting him up to mostly be comic relief. 

By making Han into a human character, Lucas made him much more down to Earth (so to speak) and relatable, and the character had an easier time onscreen relating to his fellow humans.

Changing Solo’s job description also made him more relatable: originally, he was going to be a Jedi Bendu (an early incarnation of the Jedi) like Luke, but Lucas transformed Han solo into the more familiar form of space pirate, allowing Chewbacca to take the more familiar form of alien sidekick and constant Corellian companion.

If you’re interested in these changes to Han Solo and Chewbacca, you should know these are just a few of the countless ways that the earliest drafts of Star Wars differed from the final film.

Heck, this is a script where Valorum is a Sith Knight rather than an Old Republic chancellor and Biggs is Leia’s kid brother rather than Luke’s inspiration for leaving Tattooine.

Honestly, the script is all over the place and pretty boring, and the fact that it eventually became one of the greatest films ever made is so miraculous that it might genuinely be the will of The Force.