January 1982. Among the many unfairly maligned bits of the original STAR WARS comic are the hoojibs, a race of sentient telepathic creatures who look like little pink bunnies, and who feed on electrical energy. First seen in STAR WARS #55, by David Michelinie, Walt Simonson, and Tom Palmer, the hoojibs are native to an arboreal world call Arbra, where the Rebels set up a temporary base in the wake of their escape from Hoth — in a rare case of the comics creators (who were not privy to the story direction of the movies until it came time to prepare a film adaptation) successfully anticipating the next movie, which also featured the Rebels meeting cute furry creatures on a forest world.
Plif, pictured above with Chewbacca, was the hoojib "spokesmind," a very polite and thoroughly civilized fellow who accompanied Luke and Leia on a number of adventures through the rest of the series. He was a useful traveling companion: Because few people were familiar with hoojibs, he could usually be passed off as a pet, but not only was he a telepath, he could also drain the power packs of blasters and other portable equipment if he got close enough without being noticed.
There were of course also definite advantages for the hoojibs in befriending some relatively kindly bipeds:
Many STAR WARS fans still roll their eyes at any mention of hoojibs, but I have a soft spot for them. For one, they were characters, not just cute animal mascots, and in the lexicon of weird or silly STAR WARS aliens, they're really 80th percentile at most. For another, if you have any fondness at all for little furry animals, the idea of having a cute little creature you can talk to telepathically and who can occasionally do useful parlor tricks holds a definite appeal. A hoojib would make a good companion for a SW video game, and I think they'd be fun TTRPG player characters for the open-minded.
Incidentally, the issue that first introduced Plif and the hoojibs became one of a number of STAR WARS comics adapted as book-and-record sets by Buena Vista Records in 1983:
