why doesn't Chewbacca get a medal at the end of Star Wars?

Han fired the shot which blew Darth Vader out of the way, and the medal was for that, not just helping fly the Falcon. Luke got his medal for firing a shot into the vent, not flying down the trench.

He does get one, but in a smaller ceremony after he helped clean up the mess after the important people got their awards. The fact is, Chewbacca was asleep during most of the action in the battles, and if it weren't for Han Solo's endless patience, Chewbacca would have been unemployed a long time ago.

Nobody really cared about Chewbacca, have you noticed? In The Empire Strikes Back, they torture everyone else, but no one cares enough about Chewbacca to even go looking for him. Why? Because he wasn't even worth torturing. I'm sorry to have to break it to you, but these are the cold, hard facts.

While I have never heard an "official" answer mine was:

Serious:

In Chewbacca's culture they don't have medals and it would be an insult to give him one. The acknowledgment by fellow warriors was enough.

Non-Serious

Leia gave him some powerful lovin' after the ceremony, worth far more than any medal.

At the 1997 MTV Movie Awards, Carrie Fisher gives Chewbacca his much deserved award.

I don't know why he doesn't get one, but I remember reading somewhere that Peter Mayhew, who played Chewbacca, didn't care about getting a medal becasue he gets the last line of the film. I also remember that a fan group or something got him one.

Denied!!!! heavily, in case you examine the unique novelization by technique of George Lucas, which replaced into truly ghost-written by technique of Alan Dean Foster, Chewbacca were given his medal later, yet Princess Leia did not placed it on him because Chewie replaced into too tall and he or she couldn't attain. heavily, examine the e book!

Well, consider this.....Chewbacca is a 7 foot (plus) Wookiee....Princess Leia, on the other hand, is somewhere in the region of 5 feet tall......mind you, they could have made him kneel down, I suppose...

never thought about it all. good point. btw, chewbacca was a replacement for a dog lucas had as a child. i liked knowing that.

He did - unfortunatly, as Wookies shed terribly, the fur to which the medal was attached fell off before the screen was shot.

I assume that since it was the first scene shot, he hadn't given it much thought.

I mean, the surviving pilots of the Death Star battle should have gotten one as well, right?