Star Wars

I have been a Star Wars fan for as long as I can remember. I’ve always been captivated by its deeply immersive universe, well-crafted mythology, memorable characters, iconic imagery, and, of course, John Williams’s powerful and instantly recognisable score. But what fascinates me the most about the franchise are the living things that populate the Star Wars galaxy – their place in that universe, their biology, and also their real-world inspiration and design. There are so many alien races, often crammed into the background of busy scenes, that only the most diehard fan would be able to correctly identify even half of them. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen A New Hope – and yet during almost every rewatch, I catch a glimpse of an alien in the background of the Mos Eisley cantina that I swear I haven’t seen before.

As a zoologist, I’m perhaps particularly intrigued by the creatures – the wildlife, the non-sentient animals – that occasionally pop up in the Star Wars films. Sometimes, these are part of important plot beats, such as the rancor or the wampa; other times, they are brief, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearances that serve only to flesh out the planets on which they are found. So, to that end, I’ve decided to go through all of the live-action Star Wars films – firstly, the nine movies in the Skywalker Saga, and then the two spin-off films – to try and find as many creatures as possible, from the well-known to the obscure. I will talk a bit about their in-universe lore and how the filmmakers brought them to life. If I finish, I might move on to the live-action Star Wars television series, such as The Mandalorian, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Andor.

Note: This series won’t focus on the sentient races in the films. That would be a truly enormous undertaking that is probably a bit beyond me, but never say never, I suppose.

But first, let’s go back to 1977, the year that the Star Wars franchise began (partway through the saga), with Episode IV: A New Hope (originally just called Star Wars). I’ll be including the creatures in (roughly) the order that they appear in the films.

The first creature we see in A New Hope is actually dead. During C-3PO’s trek across Tatooine’s Dune Sea, we see the bleached skeleton of a huge beast in the sand behind him. These are the bones of a krayt dragon, Tatooine’s apex predator. These gargantuan serpentine-like reptiles lurk in the loose sands of Tatooine’s wastelands, emerging to attack unsuspecting prey such as Tusken Raiders, Jawas, and banthas. They have even been known to kill and consume sarlaccs before crawling into their pits and claiming the caverns as their homes.

Krayt dragons produce a venom which they can spit great distances to ward off assailants. This highly acidic substance is lethal – it swiftly dissolves any organic tissue it comes into contact with. When retained internally, the venom serves as a digestive aid in breaking down the dragon’s food. Understandably, these leviathans are a peril to colonists and natives alike – even the Tusken Raiders keep their distance. Despite their ferociousness, however, krayt dragons are hunted for the precious and elusive pearls that form in their stomachs.

The skeleton of a krayt dragon seen in A New Hope is a fibreglass model, which was originally used as a Diplodocus skeleton in the obscure 1975 Disney comedy One of Our Dinosaurs is Missing. Its inclusion in Star Wars was a matter of happenstance. When some forgotten equipment needed to be flown out to the shooting location in Tunisia, the skeleton was tossed in with the cargo simply because they had space for it. When the crew saw it, they thought it looked appropriately alien and placed it in the sand dunes for the scene in which C-3PO treks across Tatooine’s desert. The creature would not even be given a canonical name until many years after A New Hope was released.

Once filming in Tunisia was over, the production team abandoned the krayt dragon skeleton in the desert, along with several sets. The entire area is now a significant tourist attraction, attracting thousands of visitors each year. Locals take advantage of the traffic by conducting tours of the ruins and salvaging the abandoned sets to sell memorabilia. During the filming of Episode II: Attack of the Clones in 2000, the crew visited the site in Tunisia and found that the krayt dragon skeleton was still there. Today, however, although some of the old sets remain, the dragon has been lost to the shifting dunes.

Although the bones of a krayt dragon first appeared in A New Hope in 1977, living specimens didn’t make their first appearance until 2001, in Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds, which is now considered part of the Legends continuity. The krayt dragon made its first live-action appearance in The Mandalorian season 2 premiere, ‘Chapter 9: The Marshal’, which we will cover at a later date.

Weighing 4,000 kg and measuring 2.5 metres in height, Tatooine’s beloved mammoth-like banthas roam the desert in herds of up to 25 individuals. Dark, shaggy fur protects the bantha from Tatooine’s twin suns, while its long tail is useful for swatting unwanted pests. The creatures’ four-toed feet spread wide across the sand, dispersing their weight and also heat across their rough, padded surfaces.

The Tusken revere the gentle, intelligent banthas and have domesticated them to transport passengers and haul heavy goods. At the age of seven, a Tusken youth is matched with a bantha calf that seals the pair for life. When the bantha reaches maturity, it goes into the desert with its Tusken companion, where the duo jointly undertake initiation rites. When Tuskens marry, their banthas likewise become mates. The death of its bonded Tusken can cause a bantha to fall into a deep depression or even die soon afterwards.

Domesticated banthas feed on vegetation found in the wild and scraps doled out by their handlers. In addition to serving as benign beasts of burden (not only on Tatooine but on many other planets across the galaxy), they also produce distinctly blue milk, which can be consumed directly or used as an ingredient in foods like butter, yoghurt, or ice cream. Bantha meat can be cooked into burgers or steaks, or dried and cut into an easily transportable jerky. Their dry dung can be burned as fuel, and tanned bantha hides are used to create clothing and furniture.

Both males and females have spiral-shaped horns that grow at a rate of one knob per year, marking the creatures’ age in clearly measurable nodules. These segments offer a glimpse into a bantha’s well-being. For example, thicker segments indicate years when food was plentiful, while thinner, cracked sections indicate famine or drought. The segments on male horns are wider than those on female horns. Male horns also complete two spirals over the course of a lifetime, whereas female horns complete only one.

Early concept art depicted the bantha as a smaller creature that might be portrayed by a horse. But eventually, the bantha swelled to the size of an elephant – and, in fact, the banthas seen in Episode IV were indeed played by an elephant. Mardji, a 22-year-old Asian elephant, was, at the time, a resident of Marine World Africa U.S.A. (currently known as Six Flags Discovery Kingdom and in a new location). It took six crew members to make Mardji a costume that would fit her and that she would tolerate. The base of this costume was a howdah (an elephant saddle) with added palm fronds to create the shaggy coat of a bantha. Then, a special head mask was moulded from chicken wire and sprayed with foam to give it shape. The long ‘beard’ was made from horse hair, while the curved horns were made from flexible ventilation tubing.

Mardji shot her scenes in January 1977 at Desolation Canyon in Death Valley, and played in a creek during shooting breaks. To make the shoot less unpleasant for her, one of her usual trainers was dressed as one of the two Tusken Raiders in the scene, and she was fed several apples as a reward. Despite her training, her trunk would pop out of her mask from time to time, and she would sometimes try to shed her costume, but the cast and crew (George Lucas among them) loved the elephant too much to get impatient. Because the production could only afford one elephant, for scenes with two banthas, Mardji was filmed twice, and the images were put together using optical compositing. Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) later created digital banthas for their appearance in the Prequel trilogy.

The distinct moaning sound of the bantha came from sound designer Ben Burtt’s need to record as many bear sounds as possible to create Chewbacca’s voice. Among those recordings were some given to Burtt by a documentary producer named George Casey, who had recorded animal sounds from across the world. These bear recordings were then slowed down to create the sound of the banthas.

So, what happened to Mardji after her brief career as a bantha? Well, during the production of The Empire Strikes Back, special effects artists Dennis Muren, Phil Tippett, and Jon Berg visited the elephant at the zoo and shot footage of her, which served as a reference for the movements of the AT-AT walkers. Many years later, in November 1995, Mardji was euthanised after suffering from chronic bone inflammation.

Rugged reptiles with thick hides, dewbacks are plodding but reliable mounts. They are easily domesticated, provided they are obtained at a young age (preferably as an egg), and they have long been a favoured method of organic transportation on planets such as Tatooine, where frequent sandstorms often cause equipment failures. Their herd mentality also makes them inclined to follow the group, human-led or otherwise. Historically, dewbacks have been used as hauliers for merchants and moisture farmers, and as mounts by the Empire’s sandtroopers. Though they usually move slowly, they are capable of brief bursts of surprising speed – up to 50 kph – when prodded by their riders.

Dewbacks are named for their habit of licking the dew from the backs of fellow herd members. They are known for their thick hides, which retain bodily fluids while also protecting against Tatooine’s blazing suns. They are omnivores and will eat whatever small animals they can find, as well as tubers and desert vegetation. Dewback eggs, which are buried in the sand, are easy food for hungry predators, so females must produce anywhere from 50 to 85 eggs per year.

For the original filming of Star Wars, the dewback was a mechanised life-size puppet made from fibreglass covered with a latex skin. George Lucas believed that the use of dewbacks by the sandtroopers as a means of transport (instead of mechanical means, such as a landspeeder) would give the desert search scene an ‘element of surprise’. However, the dewback created for the movie was not made with extensive movement in mind – it featured limited articulation, much to Lucas’ frustration. ‘It was a very crude thing,’ he recalls. ‘He had a big stick in his head that somebody could move back and forth. It was basically a big rubber statue.’ As such, the dewback was relegated to the background of shots rather than seen close-up. A single dewback could be seen during the Imperial search for the droids. The same puppet was placed outside the Mos Eisley Cantina. The original dewback puppet was abandoned in the Tunisian desert along with other large props, including the krayt dragon skeleton.

In 1995, additional footage for the scene of the sandtroopers searching for the droids was filmed in Yuma, Arizona, for the 1997 Special Edition of A New Hope. Computer-generated imagery was used to add dewbacks to both the desert and Mos Eisley sequences.

No city or town is without its vermin infestation, and in the wretched hive of scum and villainy that is Mos Eisley, there’s an outbreak of scurriers. These small, rodent-like creatures are named for their swift gait and skittish temperament. They skitter across the sands of Tatooine in packs, though they quickly disband in the face of danger. Scurriers prefer to stand on two legs to get a better view of their surroundings, freeing up their forelegs to dig for food in the sand. In and around settlements, they subsist mainly on refuse and stolen food. Some scurriers possess antlers, though the evolutionary purpose of these appendages is unknown, as scurriers do not usually battle one another for dominance or exhibit aggressive tendencies towards predators.

The scurriers were digitally created and inserted into the Special Edition of Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope. Along with the rest of the Mos Eisley menagerie, they were designed by TyRuben Ellingson. Concepts of the scurriers varied from reptilian to mammalian to an indeterminate, Muppet-like creature. The final computer-generated model – that of a horned rodent running on its back legs – was loosely based on Velociraptor studies that Ellingson had developed for the 1993 movie Jurassic Park.

George Lucas drew plenty of inspiration from Hollywood Westerns when conceptualising the rough-and-tumble aesthetic and ambience of Tatooine’s Mos Eisley, and, like any town from the days of the Old West, beasts of burden were a common sight. Before A New Hope: Special Edition, the only creature seen was the shaggy, goat-like jerba, tethered near the entrance to Chalmun’s Spaceport Cantina and facing away from the camera. Two jerba props were created from a variety of materials, including fibreglass, latex skin, and realistic hair. Although their heads could apparently tilt slightly, the rest of their bodies remained static. The jerbas served as atmospheric background beasts, enriching the film’s worldbuilding with subtle realism, but there wasn’t much life to them. What the spaceport needed was a bit more beastly foot traffic…

So, for the Special Edition, an entirely new type of creature was digitally added to the main thoroughfare of Mos Eisley: the ronto. These enormous, four-legged, mild-mannered beasts of burden are used by the locals, such as the native Jawas, to haul cargo and passengers through the streets of Tatooine’s port towns. Though a towering 4.25 metres in height, rontos are nonetheless skittish and easily startled, thanks mainly to poor eyesight. Facial flaps on the sides of their heads can be shifted to cover their eyes during a sandstorm.

Designing the ronto fell to artist TyRuben Ellingson, who, having previously worked on Jurassic Park, used a brachiosaur as a starting point, adding enough modifications to make it distinctly Star Wars. In fact, its genesis as a dinosaur is how this creature got its name. Throughout the making of the sequence, the ILM animators referred to the otherwise nameless beast as a ‘bronto’ – in reference to the Brontosaurus, another long-necked dinosaur, and the archetypal sauropod in general media. When asked to name the animal, George Lucas simply dropped the ‘b’ from the name, and thus the ronto was christened.

While on board the Death Star, Luke is nearly pulled into the murky depths of the trash compactor by a one-eyed creature known as the dianoga. These creatures (also sometimes known as garbage squids) grow up to 10 metres long and thrive in swamps, sewers, and junkyards of their native planet, Vodran. Since they feed on refuse, these creatures are sometimes bred in space stations for waste processing and, as such, have spread throughout the galaxy, particularly in their small larval forms. Older specimens can be aggressive, seizing prey in their seven muscular, suckered tentacles. Their regenerative capabilities enable them to regrow lost limbs, and their ability to change colour allows them to camouflage in nearly any environment. Rising from the dianoga’s body is a long neck, which gives way to a single eye stalk. It often raises its eye above the water to assess threats.

The dianoga in A New Hope was initially designed to be much larger and more frightening than it is in the final cut of the film. A carnivorous cephalopod with tentacles, suckers, and a single eyestalk, the dianoga was, according to George Lucas, meant to be ‘a cross between a jellyfish and an octopus, a transparent muck monster which can take any shape.’ But due to budgetary issues, the dianoga wound up as a ‘one-eyed creature with tentacles.’

The dianoga was constructed out of hefty plastic, and, as Lucas recalls, ‘it started to get very cumbersome and big. It had to be run by ramjets [a kind of jet engine], which I didn’t like, so I rejected the idea. And I kept rejecting things to the point where all we had left was a tentacle.’ As such, the audience sees only a small piece of the creature; what lurks beneath the waters remains a mystery, adding tension to the scene. But Lucas was reportedly less than impressed with the finished result, having envisioned something bigger and more ominous.

The name ‘dianoga’ has a curious history, being one of the oldest terms in Star Wars lore. In the early drafts of A New Hope, the Jedi were called Dai Nogas, or occasionally just ‘Dai.’ This evolved into Jedi, and dianoga (or variations thereof) came to describe a nasty creature lurking about in the garbage (the early scripts didn’t always have the trash compactor aboard the Death Star).

And that’s it for A New Hope (barring the creatures that we only see as holographic dejarik pieces). Next time, we look at the creatures from The Empire Strikes Back.