You know a Star Wars-ass name when you see one. There’s something about the cadence and the mouthfeel of a name that immediately suggests it could only exist in the Star Wars setting. It’s that combination of unexpected noun followed by a handful of Scrabble tiles chosen at random. It’s the bare minimum effort to make an Easter egg from an easily recognizable phrase. (Looking at you, Ello Asty). A prerequisite of a SW-AN is that it’s fun to say: Jabba the Hutt is a Star Wars name, but Max Rebo is a Star Wars-ass name.
Star Wars Outlaws has its share of Star Wars-ass names, like Jet Kordo, Sliro Ruback, or Waka. But are any of those the most Star Wars-ass name? Almost definitely not: There’s a whole extended universe of names out there to choose from.
Before we get started, let’s establish two rules for finding the most Star Wars-ass name:
- The character has to have appeared on screen at some point in an official property — in a cartoon, show, movie, comic, or video game. No fanfic or obscure RPG rulebooks. Call this one the Glup Shitto Rule.
- It’s got to be fun to say. We’re calling this the Elan Sleazebaggano Rule. While Elan Sleazebaggano does appear on screen in a Star Wars movie, his name is dumb, lazy, and just no fun. We could also call this the Therm Scissorpunch Rule, because come on.
With that established, here are Polygon’s nominees for the Most Star Wars-Ass Name. By all means, weigh in with your nominations below.
While the other members of Jabba’s palace/house band — Max Rebo and Droopy McCool — do have some Star Wars-ass names, lead singer Sy Snootles outdoes them. It’s not just the alliteration, though that helps. It’s not even that her illogical proboscis-plus-plump-lips face is undeniably a snoot (with or without the second mouth and its retractable tusks). It’s that she didn’t have to be so prominent. Sy Snoodles is a bulky, jerky puppet in the 1983 version of Return of the Jedi, and she got a full CGI remake and solo performance in the Special Edition in 1997. Which means multiple people went out of their way to make sure we got to bear witness to the glory of the Star Wars-ass name that is Sy Snootles. —Jeff Parkin
Image: Lucasfilm
“Plo Koon is so inaccessible on the outside, he’s so weird-looking. […] In one of our story meetings, George [Lucas] said that only a person with a diseased mind likes Plo Koon.” —Clone Wars writer Henry Gilroy on a 2019 Star Wars podcast
Like Boba Fett before him, the austere, dangerous-looking background character Jedi Master Plo Koon gained a following despite doing little of importance on screen, then dying an embarrassing death. That avid following includes none other than current Star Wars master brain Dave Filoni, has a Plo Koon costume, an autographed portrait of the actor, a model of his ship, a replica lightsaber, and a bust of his head in office, and dressed as the Jedi Master for the premiere of Revenge of the Sith. There may literally be no one else more Plo-brained on Earth.
Thanks to Filoni’s control of the Clone Wars TV series, the wise Jedi made many appearances on the small screen, leading a loyal clone trooper battalion and giving sage advice to “Little Ahsoka.” Filoni’s affection for Plo Koon is why it was entirely believable when the script for The Mandalorian’s season 2 finale had Plo Koon standing in for Luke Skywalker, so Mark Hamill’s cameo could be kept secret. But what about the name? Well it’s extremely Star Wars, with a fun-to-say three-letter first name and a not even just vaguely problematic last name. Perhaps Lucas was right. —Clayton Ashley
I still think of Ponda Baba as a turning point in my Star Wars fandom. Writing for a long-ago roundup much like this one, but about Star Wars characters that deserved a spin-off, I joked that the tarantula-faced guy who gets his arm cut off in A New Hope really deserved more attention and his own side story. Then I started looking into it, and found out that Ponda Baba not only has a name and a species (Aqualish), he’d eventually developed an extensive backstory in Star Wars spin-off comics and stories. (This was all before his cameo in Rogue One.)
This was the point where I finally accepted that Star Wars canon had far outpaced me, I was never going to catch up, and I didn’t really want to. The urge to treat every tiny moment of a good story as ponderously important and ripe for exploration and exploitation hasn’t done the Star Wars universe any good and even removing the vast majority of the written work from the canon didn’t help. Ponda Baba did not need to become a complex, trenchant source of character drama. But he does have a great name. Say it, and you sound like you’re trying to gargle with a mouth full of cotton balls. —Tasha Robinson
Image: Lucasfilm
Keef Girgo isn’t a real person in the Star Wars universe — it’s the fake name Cassian Andor assumes in episode 7 of Andor when he runs into some legal trouble by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The name has a great Star Wars flow — both words are more like throat-sounds than names — and it is endlessly fun to say out loud. But what I like most about it is, it’s an invention of a character within the universe, seemingly poking fun at how ridiculous the names he’s constantly surrounded by are.
The name also caused me to spontaneously break out into a West Side Story parody, and it’s rarely left my head since. So sing along:
“Keef. Girgo. Keef! Girgo! Say it loud, and there’s (cantina) music playing. Say it soft and it’s almost like (a tauntaun) braying. Keef Girgo! I cannot stop saying Keef Girgo!” —Pete Volk
Image: Dark Horse Comics
Gather ’round, children, to hear the legend of Jedi Master Soon Bayts. Once upon a time, Sue Rostoni was a comics editor at Lucas Licensing, who was known — or at least known by writer Randy Stradley (now Vice President of Publishing for Dark Horse Comics) — to be a stickler for titles. Specifically, he noticed that he couldn’t simply refer to Yoda or Mace Windu without Rostoni changing it to “Master Yoda” or “Master Windu.” And for the 2000 miniseries Star Wars: Jedi Council: Acts of War, he stuck a little joke in his script to catch her in the act.
“I introduced a completely unimportant tertiary Jedi character named Soon Baytes,” Stradley wrote on the boards of The Force.net in 2008, “hoping that she would be going through the script, come across the character, and change him to “Master Baytes,” and I could say “gotcha!” and then change the character’s name to something more suitable.”
Master Bayts, you see. (If you don’t, try saying it out loud.) Unfortunately, Rostoni didn’t catch it (in a 2005 forum post, she explained that someone other than her had edited that particular script), Stradley never had the chance to edit it, it went to print (with the “Bayts” spelling), and now it’s canon. Subsequent mentions of Bayts have been extremely minor (understandably), but thanks to the quiet efforts of Star Wars writers like Haden Blackman and Abel G. Peña, the legend of Master Bayts lives on. —Susana Polo
Hammerhead. Walrus Man. Prune Face. Squid Head. Early Star Wars character-naming rules, delivered via Topps trading cards and Kenner action figures, didn’t quite fit the mold of modern-age Star Wars-ass names. Before the days when the poor souls at Lucasfilm were forced to catalog and uniquely name every alien species and on-screen character, we had guys like Yak Face and Snaggletooth. Today, we occasionally get rare exceptions in this style, like Two Tubes, a guy (well, a pair of guys) whose identity derives from his breathing apparatus.
That’s why I love The Mandalorian’s Doctor Mandible, a throwback to the wilder west of the Star Wars galaxy, when a weirdo alien’s defining physical feature was half of their name. We know two things about Doctor Mandible: He is a doctor, and he is a giant ant. (Well, three things: He’s apparently fond of the card game sabacc.)
The Mandalorian gave us everything we really needed to know about Doctor Mandible. There is no need for a follow-up, a lore explainer, or a From A Certain Point of View short story. This ant-man, who has received a doctorate, exists in Star Wars. I don’t even need to know what kind of doctor he is. He is simply… Doctor Mandible. —Michael McWhertor
Image: Lucasfilm Ltd.
Continuing the trend of names that are actually just adjectives (I’m looking at you, Savage Oppress), Salacious B. Crumb is the cackling pet/sidekick to Jabba the Hutt first encountered in Return of the Jedi. He has maybe a total of five minutes of screen time, mostly spent laughing at the misfortune of Jabba’s victims.
Officially, Salacious B. Crumb is a Kowakian monkey-lizard. While he’s only featured in a handful of scenes, this is a George Lucas movie, so he needed a name. If legend is to be believed, Return of the Jedi puppeteer (and eventual Mad God director) Phil Tippett was one of the people handed the task. A few beers later, he slurred the word “shoelaces” while attempting to tie his shoes. While Lucas initially rejected the name, he massaged it into “Salacious” and gave added “Crumb” as a tribute to underground comic artist Robert Crumb.
Salacious was brought to life by sculptor Tony McVey, who gave the strange animal a combination of fur, leathery skin, beady eyes, and a beak that would eventually peck out C-3PO’s eyes. While the little gremlin eventually met an untimely demise, his haunting laughter, mischievous demeanor, and Star Wars-ass name have made him one of the more memorable creatures of the original trilogy. —Alice Jovanee
No name on this list is as fun to say as that of the Governor of Naboo from Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace. It’s the perfect combination of a punchy first name that’s zippy to say, and a last name that descends into absolute gibberish by three letters in. More importantly though, it’s a last name that’s at least two syllables shorter than it should be, which is also a key tenant of great Star Wars names. Saying “Sio Bibble” is like climbing a staircase, only for the steps to disappear midway through and leave you plummeting into the Grand Canyon. It’s a sudden, steep drop that makes you sound like a vaudeville performer who got yanked from the stage halfway through some insulting crowd work. In other words, it’s a beautiful, and perfectly Star Wars-ass name. —Austen Goslin
Photo: Jonathan Olley/Lucasfilm
I love Babu Frik. He’s like a balding Mogwai with an engineering degree. He shows up for approximately two minutes total in Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker, which also happens to be my two favorite minutes in that film’s entire runtime. I love his gibberish alien baby-talk; I love his wispy whiskers and eyebrows; I love his teeny-tiny welding tools and teeny-tiny welding glasses. Most of all, I love his name, which I’ve just taken to saying out loud in the most nasally voice possible while in the midst of writing this paragraph.
Babu Frik is just a weird little guy in a sci-fi franchise in part known for its proud lineage of weird little guys. He’s certainly not the weirdest, nor is he even the littlest. But y’know something? He’s my weird little guy! I love him. Not only that, but I love how he pronounces his name. Ba-bu Fre-ek. Like if you were to mispronounce “uwu” and the word “freak” together with a little “B” at the beginning. He’s just a little guy in a big wild world, using his skills as a droidsmith to earn a living, while he’s also down to fly in the passenger seat of a starfighter against the First Order. With all that said, why wouldn’t you love him?! —Toussaint Egan
