Chewbacca’s ‘Last Jedi’ Porg Was Designed to Look Like Him

Turns out, there’s a good reason why Chewbacca took to one particular Porg so much that he brought him on board the Millennium Falcon, as seen in the most recent trailer for Star Wars: The Last Jedi: he saw a little bit of himself in the little guy. Literally.

Neal Scanlan, who heads up Lucasfilm’s Creature Workshop for the Star Wars franchise, told Empire that the Porg seen on board the Falcon is intentionally meant to remind the viewer of Chewbacca. “That porg in particular shows some very Wookiee traits in the way he’s colored,” Scanlan notes. “His patterning is very similar to Chewie’s.”

He also teased some more information about the other new alien races seen briefly in trailers for the movie; the Caretakers of Ahch-To are related to the Porgs (“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”), and the fox-like creatures briefly glimpsed in the most recent trailer are literally the products of their environments.

“The theory is they’ve fed off this planet for so long that their fur has become crystalline,” Scanlan suggested. “They’ve taken on the very surface of the planet they live on.”

With this level of thinking behind the various species in a galaxy far, far away, perhaps one of the future Star Wars Story stand-alone spinoffs could be a fictional nature documentary …

Star Wars: The Last Jedi will reach theaters Dec. 15.