It’s official: porgs are good.
The screaming, winged guinea pig-owl things weren’t nearly as annoying as many Ewok-hating Star Wars fans feared they’d be in The Last Jedi. (Plus, they’re delicious.) But porgs, though they may look like a wide-eyed way of selling toys, well, that’s true, but they also served a purpose in the movie.
“From what I gathered, Rian [Johnson] had gone to shoot this sequence on Skellig Michael, which is the real island location that stands in for Ahch-To, and that island is covered in puffins,” said The Last Jedi creature concept designer Jake Lunt Davies on the official Star Wars website. Skellig Michael is a wildlife preserve, so the crew couldn’t shoo the birds way or roast them, Chewbacca-style. Instead, Davies explained, Johnson came up with a workaround.
“You can’t remove them. You physically can’t get rid of them. And digitally removing them is an issue and a lot of work, so let’s just roll with it, play with it. And so I think he thought, ‘Well, that’s great, let’s have our own indigenous species.’ We’d already started work on the Caretakers, which again was a brief from Rian. We’d just been told ‘puffin people.’ Yeah, there was going to be this race of people and puffins again were a source of inspiration for Rian. The puffins were sort of a big influence on everything, really.” (Via)
It’s like I’ve always said: behind every great porg, there’s a great puffin.
(Via Star Wars)