The phrase “soccer ball droid” would feel right at home in any of Reggie Watts’ Dada funk songs. So perhaps the most-surprising thing about this collaboration between Star Wars: The Force Awakens‘ own BB-8 and The Late Late Show band is that it took this long to happen.
Bandleader Watts whipped out his falsetto to woo the Jean-Ralphio voiced droid, and BB-8 held its own with a few bleep-filled solos. We’re sure the droid was just ecstatic to finally be done with his press tour and back to working on his real passion — loop-based funk music.
If you think we’re assigning a lot of feelings to a glorified Nike product, you should know that BB-8 had actual dialogue at one point in the creation of The Force Awakens. As Ben Schwartz explained in a previous interview with Uproxx, the story of how BB-8’s speech came to be is a fascinating one:
“I was lucky enough that when JJ Abrams was making the new Star Wars film, he came home on a little break and he said, ‘Hey I have this new droid called BB-8, and I want him to have personality. You know, everybody loves R2-D2, but I want to put him in situations where he can feel warmth, and he can be funny, and he can do all these things.’ Because he had these big scenes with Rey – and I can talk about it all finally – all these big scenes with Daisy Ridley’s character, and John Boyega’s character, and so the process was at the beginning. We wrote real dialogue for him.
“So, there’s recordings of me overseeing this. JJ would show me scenes, and I would say real dialogue as BB-8 in response to whatever Rey or people were saying. And then, the goal was to give that to LucasFilms and they would turn them into beeps and boops.”
No word yet on if Schwartz was brought in to lay down some bars for the Late Late Show performance.
