When the second full trailer for Star Wars: The Last Jedi was released, people went wild about porgs, the “Star Wars version of puffins” who get into everything and have seemingly befriended Chewbacca. Oscar-winner Neal Scanlan (head of the Creature Workshop for Star Wars) confirms the interspecies fuzzy friendship and reveals more about porgs, those “ice foxes”, and BB-8 in an interview in tomorrow’s EMPIRE Magazine.
The porgs live alongside Luke Skywalker on the island of Ahch-To on Luke’s Sadness Planet. (The planet isn’t called “Luke’s Sadness Planet” but that’s the only name we’ll acknowledge.) Scanlan reveals that the porgs are genetically similar to another, more advanced species on the same island, the “caretakers”:
“With Ahch-To, it felt like the only creatures that would ever exist on this island were those indigenous to it, where very few other species and DNA would have reached them, so they’re an extrapolation from the porgs and have bird-like feet, but they’re a further developed race.”
Here’s what the caretakers looked like in the trailers:
They’re not nearly as cute as porgs, but their Puritan cosplay is on point.
Scanlan also revealed that the porg seen in the Millennium Falcon is a friend of Chewbacca’s and even has “some very Wookiee traits in the way he’s colored; his patterning is very similar to Chewie’s.” You can check out the whole interview at EMPIRE, wherein Scanlan explains that those ice foxes actually have crystalline fur, and he also describes a cute scene where BB-8 disguises himself as a First Order droid to escape from BB-9E (aka “BB-H8”). But more importantly, Chewbacca has a porg friend and that’s all we needed to know.
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(Via EMPIRE Magazine and /film)