Porgs Were Included in 'Star Wars: The Last Jedi' for a Very Practical Reason

Turns out, porgs don't just exist so you'll buy cute porg products for your kids. But, obviously, Lucasfilm really hopes you do that.

Porgs were already dividing fans before "Star Wars: The Last Jedi" opened in theaters. Were they adorable or annoying? We're squarely in the adorable camp, but there's more than one way to experience the movie and its characters. Over at StarWars.com, they shared some interesting details in why the film has porgs at all. They weren't invented to be cute sidekicks for Chewie, they were there to replace the real-life puffins on the real-life Irish island where the Luke Skywalker scenes were filmed.

Creature concept designer Jake Lunt Davies had a Q&A with the official Star Wars site, and slipped in details about director Rian Johnson's vision for the porgs:

"From what I gathered, Rian had gone to shoot this sequence on Skellig Michael, which is the real island location that stands in for Ahch-To, and that island is covered in puffins. It's a wildlife preserve and everywhere you look there are hundreds of birds dotted around the landscape. From what I gathered, Rian, in a positive spin on this, was looking at how can he work with this. 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.' We'd already started work on the Caretakers, which again was a brief from Rian. We'd just been told 'puffin people.' Yeah, there was going to be this race of people and puffins again were a source of inspiration for Rian. The puffins were sort of a big influence on everything, really."

As they should be. Read a lot more about how the porgs were "hatched."

Porgs even ended up with their own Twitter emojis -- for #Porgs, but also #PorgLife and #PorgNation, for which Rian Johnson personally (but jokingly) apologized. Now we just need special emojis for the precious Fathiers.

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