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The new trailer for Star Wars: The Last Jedi came out, and there's a lot to be excited about in there. Family dynamics, kick-ass action sequences, Carrie Fisher's final appearance, spaceships blowing up other spaceships. But there was one unexpected thing that captured the Internet's imagination: porgs.
If you blink watching the trailer you just might miss it, but there's a brand new Star Wars animal out in space, and it's called a porg. They kind of look like an angry, furry bird, with no nose. Everyone is in love with them:
We've been burned before by made up creatures in the Star Wars franchise (cough Jar Jar cough), but the porg looks promising. It's small, cute, and though it appears to have very sharp teeth, it's also extremely huggable. And you can get your very own at a reasonable price:
I was gonna wait until I heard a porg speak before giving into the craze. But, umm. pic.twitter.com/Lu6n3ZM6aC
In an interview with StarWars.com, creature concept designer Jake Lunt Davies reveals that the Porgs were only invented to cover up the actual adorable puffins that were present on Skellig Michael, the Irish Island on which the Luke Skywalker scenes were shot.
The island is a wildlife preserve for hundreds of the birds, and by law, crew members of Star Wars: The Last Jedi had to leave the puffins undisturbed and couldn't move them out of the way for key scenes.
"From what I gathered, Rian, in a positive spin on this, was looking at how can he work with this," explains Davies. "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.'"
The final design for Porgs stemmed from Rian Johnson’s vague request for "puffin people," which he interpreted as "so cute Lisa Frank will be pissed she didn’t invent it first."
