STAR WARS REBELS: WHAT’S IN A NAME?

Via Starwars.com:

My wife Sarah is fascinated by names — the traditions associated with naming a child, the trends that names go through, and the meanings of names and their various translations in different languages.

All interesting stuff, but why is this relevant to Star Wars? Sarah joined me for this first time at a toy fair in New York early last year, and she noticed something that I hadn’t — in fact, it was something that nobody else outside the Lucasfilm Story Group had, that the character names from Star Wars Rebels seemed to be inspired by historical and biblical names. I wasn’t able to confirm this directly with Dave Filoni and Simon Kinberg until the press conference at Star Wars Celebration in Anaheim in April.

Upon asking the question, about where the names for the Rebels characters came from, Simon Kinberg was the first to respond: “One of the things we did say consciously was that there was a biblical sense to the naming and to sort of seriousness of purpose of the original movies. The cloaks themselves have a form or religious feel to them. We were aware that there was an element of that from the original films that we were trying to connect to.”

Dave Filoni continued: “I like to point out when I get in the room with the writers that the names in Star Wars are very purposeful, but when you get into the Expanded Universe, they become often become very odd and contain a lots of x, y’s, and z’s and hyphens and that’s all fine, but when you’re in a medium like we are, you know Han Solo, the guy’s pretty much by himself — and that’s kind of the genius of George, and he would disguise this stuff and I didn’t think about that when I was a kid.”

“Names have a purpose, if you know someone’s full name in folklore then you have a power over them, because to know their name gives you an understanding of who they are. To make up a name that is odd, you know just for the sake of it that sounds like a space world name, isn’t really what Star Wars does. I think having these names, like Hera, a very purposeful name for the type of character she is, Chopper is a very destructive little character that causes problems and chops things up — yes it’s blatant, but when the characters work and you like the characters it doesn’t matter and you just accept them. Ezra was definitely a connection to the fact that I liked the name Luke and it was a real kid’s name. We [Simon and I] both actually know a kid named Ezra in our lives, and I’m like ‘that sounds like Star Wars to me.’ There was a slight in intention around Bridger in that the character is a bridge between the prequel trilogy and the original trilogy — there is a bridging of topics.”

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