20 pieces of trivia you need to know about Star Wars

Maz Kanata is a retired pirate

We know very little about Maz Kanata, and frustratingly even less about how she came to look after Anakin and Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber. But we do know that she’s a former pirate, and do you know what? We’re here for that.

The Force Awakens director JJ Abrams told Entertainment Weekly that Maz “was a pirate for a long time. She’s lived over a thousand years. She’s had this watering hole for about a century, and it’s like another bar that you’d find in a corner of the Star Wars universe.”

He is of course referring to the bar on Takodana, where Finn and Rey meet Maz for the first time and Chewbacca avoids his girlfriend. And whilst we only know as much as Finn and Rey in this moment, we do know something about the flags posted up around her pub.

As Dork Side of the Force pointed out, one Star Wars fan did some excellent detective work and identified several symbols on the flags, spotting a couple of logos associated with bounty hunter Boba Fett, including the Mythosaur skull printed on his shoulder armor.

The same fan, Calithlin from Star Wars News Net, also found podracer flags and the pirate symbol of Hondo Ohnaka, a character from Clone Wars and Rebels.

The symbol of the 501st Legion, a fan organization, also appears on one of the flags (though you’ll have to squint to see it). The 501st is an international group dedicated to the making and wearing accurate replicas of Stormtrooper armor and the costumes of other villains from the Star Wars universe.

It has been incorporated into the extended Star Wars universe since author Timothy Zahn included them as a fictional Stormtrooper team in his 2004 novel Survivor’s Quest — and the legion is also in canon still, thanks to appearances in new comics and some of the TV shows.

We’re jealous, frankly.