There’s a “Let the Wookie win” joke to be made here but I couldn’t land it. Oh well. — Dan

How Chewbacca Roared a Woman into New Teeth

It started as a prank. A funny, and mostly harmless one — annoying, sure, but most pranks are. And it resulted in dental surgery. But in a good way.

In the early summer of 2020, while the world was already in the throes of a (hopefully once-in-a-century) pandemic, an Australian woman named Jessica Sewell, then age 29, was dealing with a problem unrelated to the virus claiming lives around the globe: her phone wouldn’t stop ringing. All day long, she received voicemails from people she had never met. And they were all doing the same thing: making roaring noises, hoping to imitate Chewbacca, the Wookiee from the Star Wars franchise.

It wasn’t an accident. 

Days or weeks before the non-stop prank calls, Sewell broke up with her boyfriend — she had discovered that he had been messaging other women via Facebook, and probably not in a manner appropriate for someone already in a relationship. Sewell’s ex didn’t take kindly to being dumped and was out for revenge. Petty and mostly harmless revenge, thankfully. As seen below (via News9 Australia), he put up posters around the area, inviting passersby to enter a Chewbacca-soundalike contest. To enter, one just needed to call the phone number provided, roar into the phone as Wookieelike as possible, and hope the judges selected your entry. The winning roar would receive AU$100. 

But there was no contest, of course. The phone number on the poster was Sewell’s. The roars were funny at first, she admitted, but the endless stream of unwanted Star Wars jibberish was really disrupting her life and the sleep habits of her three children. As she told News9, a local news station, she was “getting phone calls at really strange hours of the night, from 1 o’clock to 4 o’clock. “Turning her story into a public interest one for the local news seemed like as good of a way as any to get the phone calls to stop. So she gave the above-linked interview to News9, also saying — jokingly — “if there’s anyone out there who can do the real Chewbacca sound, I might marry you.”

The marriage proposal didn’t come but the story did go viral, and the phone calls stopped. But the story wasn’t over. 

When TVNZ, a New Zealand station, covered Sewell’s story, one of their hosts pivoted the narrative from “funny prank” to “meanspirited media attack.” If you watch the News9 clip above — and you should, as it features some pretty good Chewbacca imitations — you may note that Sewell dyed some of her hair blue and was missing some of her front teeth. Wilson Longhurst, the TVNZ presenter who shared Sewell’s story, definitely noticed this; as the New Zealand Herald later reported, “At the end [of the segment], he said: ‘What a prize Jessica is, with all her teeth and her hair.’” (At least the Chewbacca imitators weren’t intentionally being jerks.) 

Outrage at Longhurst’s commentary spread, and while Longhurst offered an on-air apology, the story still continued to develop. Sewell appeared on TVNZ’s morning show to explain what happened to her teeth — she lost them when a previous partner (not the Star Wars guy) beat her. As Sewell, a mother to three kids, told the Herald, “There are a lot of girls out there like me, who have had domestic violence so severely ... they have to keep a smile on their face and keep going for their kids.” 

And while she wasn’t asking for anything other than for the Wookiee calls to stop, Sewell ended up getting a bit more. People from across Australia and New Zealand contacted her asking how they could help her get a new set of teeth, and she set up a GoFundMe page, here, raising over AU$8,000 (or 80 Wookiees) toward that goal. And at least one dentist offered to do the work for her, for free.

Chewbacca, once again, was a hero. (He still didn’t get a medal.)

What Would Chewbacca Eat?

I have no idea, but today’s Now I Know is sponsored by Huel. Maybe he’d give it a try, but again, I have no idea. I doubt it, because Wookiees don’t seem to be the type to meal prep, but 🤷‍♂️.

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More About Chewbacca

Today’s Bonus fact: If you didn’t get that joke at the end of the main story — about Chewy not getting a medal — well, you’re in luck, because here’s the explanation. In the 1977 movie Star Wars, the good guys win and at the end, the heroes — Luke, Han, and Chewbacca — are awarded medals for their valor and heroism by Princess Leia. Well, kind of. Luke and Han get medals, but Chewy just kind of stands there and roars. He never gets his medal.

Almost immediately after the movie hit theaters, fans complained about the oversight. Star Wars creator George Lucas offered a strange explanation about how Wookies don’t particularly care for medals and in any event, as Screen Rant reported, “The whole contingent from the Rebel Alliance went to Chewbacca's people and participated in a very large celebration” per Lucas. (That celebration was probably not Life Day, and if you don’t get that joke, you’re probably better off.) But that explanation didn’t resonate with Peter Mayhew, the man inside the Chewbacca costume. As he told Australia’s Bmag (via CinemaBlend), the likely explanation was probably a practical one: “I think it was one of two reasons. One, they didn’t have enough money to buy me a medal. Or two, Carrie [Fisher, who portrayed Princess Leia] couldn’t reach my neck, and it was probably too expensive to build a little step so that I could step down or she could step up and give me the medal.”

From the Archives: The People Who Protect Chewbacca: It’s actually dangerous being a 7-foot tall beastman in the wilderness.

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And thanks! — Dan