The Rise of Skywalker was the most polarizing Star Wars movie since… ever? (I stan The Phantom Menace, but I know I’m alone.) But there’s one thing that everyone can agree is good: Babu Frik, my best friend. Also good: the Coachella aliens. And this guy. Episode IX has issues, many, many issues, but the creature design was not one of them, which makes it extra-disappointing that a cool-sounding monster was left out of the film.
The Eye of Webbish Bog, as the creature is called (not as catchy as “porg”), was supposed to direct Kylo Ren towards the Sith wayfinder in the opening minutes of The Rise of Skywalker; the scene was even filmed, but “it didn’t make it to the movie story, plot-wise, etc. It was a fully practical character shot in a location, and it is amazing,” explained creature and special make-up effects creative supervisor Neal Scanlan.
Here’s how the Episode IX official novelization describes the Eye of Webbish Bog:
A giant emerged, a hairless creature sheening with wetness, bits of lake detritus clinging to its pasty skin. Its eyes were squeezed shut, but it could still see after a fashion, because draped over its massive bald head and across one shoulder was a second creature with long spidery tentacles. The two were locked in symbiosis. Kylo sensed the giant’s pain, as though it were a slave to the spidery being that clung to it. Yet neither could it survive alone.
Scanlan is hopeful “that we can revisit that character in some way, because it was a haunting image and a very unusual image,” maybe even on The Mandalorian. But if the EWB eats Baby Yoda, I say we send it back to the swamp-hell it came from.
(Via Collider)
