20 pieces of trivia you need to know about Star Wars

Porgs are based on puffins

Even though their name is never actually mentioned on screen, The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson’s greatest legacy is his introduction of the piggle of porgs into Star Wars canon.

Johnson himself says that the collective name for a porg is actually a murder, but we have spoken the word piggle into existence and now it is law. Let’s face it, it has a much cuter ring to it. We owe porgs this and also our enduring loyalty.

According to a StarWars.com interview with creature concept designer Jake Lunt Davies, the porgs were the result of puffins being native to Skellig Michael, the island where the scenes between Rey and Luke Skywalker on Ahch-To were filmed.

The crew were not allowed to move them because, as a species, they are protected, and it was considered too time consuming and expensive to edit them out of the shots. Johnson decided, therefore, to create a new indigenous species and simply CGI over the puffins.

Lunt Davies created numerous versions of porgs before settling on the final one we see on screen, taking inspiration from not only puffins, but other cute critters, especially ones associated with the sea.

“I probably got the porg within the first [few attempts],” he told StarWars.com. “I did about four or five pages of totally different sketches, and the porg was probably in one of those sketches. It was influenced by a seal and a pug dog and the puffin. The big eyes of a seal or the big eyes of a pug dog and the sort of funny, ugly face [of a pug].”

So, whilst we’d never ever call a pug or a porg ugly, that’s still a great fact to put in the pipe of porg nay-sayers for them to smoke.

Porgs weren’t just created to sell toys (and so what if they were, give us 1000 stuffed porgs! We’ll take the lot!). They were created to protect the puffins. We do not deserve them.