Celebrate May the Fourth with these 20 Weird Things About 'Star Wars'

Star Wars is weird. It's probably been a part of your life for so long that you no longer recognize exactly how weird it is. I mean, composer John Williams uses a Charleston swing with steel drums to convey "alien music" at the Mos Eisley cantina — the same cantina where The Star Wars Holiday Special showed us Bea Arthur sometimes liked to tend bar. Han Solo randomly tells a helpful Rebel soldier "I'll see you in hell!" despite the fact that "hell" is otherwise not a part of the belief system of any known group in that Galaxy Far, Far Away.

George Lucas spent millions of dollars just to create a CGI floorshow for the Return of the Jedi special edition. Not to mention the endless treasure trove of weirdness that is the Star Wars Expanded Universe, a vast series of novels and comics that have given us a Hutt Jedi, an interdimensional creature with a taste for human flesh (join the Church of Waru!), a giant green bunny rabbit who's a space smuggler, and zombie Gungans. As a celebration for May the Fourth (be with you), click through our gallery of 20 Really Weird Things in Star Wars.

1. Tauntaun Entrails Sleeping Bag

Now, on the surface this wraparound sleeping bag doesn’t seem that odd. Admittedly most kids like plush replicas of furry animals, not reptilians from a frozen waste. But when you consider that Han Solo slit open a dead tauntaun’s gullet with Luke’s lightsaber and shoved him inside so the beast’s guts would keep him warm, and that’s what you’re replicating with this sleeping bag, yeah, that’s a little weird. 

 

2. “Then I’ll See You in Hell!”

Han Solo, Empire Strikes Back, Star WarsWhen Han Solo mounts a tauntaun to go looking for Luke on Hoth after nightfall, a concerned fellow Rebel warns him that said tauntaun may freeze before very long, thus stranding Solo and leaving him to the long cold night. That’s an important warning to keep in mind, even if you’re going to ignore it to go find your friend. But the scruffy nerf herder didn’t realize that, obviously, since he fired right back the delicious non sequitur, “Then I’ll see you in hell!” Why such hostility, man?

  

 

3. Zombie Gungans

In W. Haden Blackman’s 2003 Clone Wars comic “The New Face of War,” the Separatists kill off a Gungan colony on one of Naboo’s moons by using Swamp Gas, a deadly, airborne poison. Though no explanation is given, several of the dead Gungans, covered in boils, their necrotic flesh rotting, appear to revive as zombie Gungans, requiring lightsaber-assisted mercy kills. Blackman confirmed this to us when he said, “That was fun because I got to kill a bunch of Gungans…twice.”

  

 

4. Boba Fett’s a Ladies Man

Boba Fett isn’t that much of a stud. He misses when he shoots at Luke at point-blank range in The Empire Strikes Back. A blind Han Solo knocks into his jetpack causing him to go screaming and flailing into the Sarlacc pit. But he sure acts like a stud. Just look at him flirting with these backup dancers at Jabba’s palace, an incredibly random moment that somehow George Lucas thought was an essential add for the Return of the Jedi special edition.

  

 

5. Jedi Rocks

Some fans will never forgive George Lucas for replacing the original song that filled Jabba the Hutt’s audience chamber, the Max Rebo Band’s “Lapti Nek,” with “Jedi Rocks” a CGI extravaganza that shifted the focus away from Max Rebo to singer Sy Snootles and crooner Joh Yowza. But think about it. You invest millions in a CGI overhaul of a scene…to create a crazy over the top floorshow musical number. How is that not incredibly awesome?

  

 

6. Jaxxon

There’s a lot of odd stuff in Marvel Comics’ initial line of Star Wars comics set during the Original Trilogy, but the oddest has to be Jaxxon, a smuggler who’s a giant green bunny rabbit. Maybe Lucas loves long-eared creatures, hence also the Gungans, but Jaxxon’s origin lies in his name. It’s a play on “Jackson,” which Bugs Bunny used to always call male characters he interacted with in Warner Bros.’ old Looney Tunes shorts.

  

 

7. Bea Arthur’s in Star Wars

The future Golden Girl, already a TV powerhouse with Maude, showed up as Ackmena, a bartender at the Mos Eisley Cantina in The Star Wars Holiday Special dealing with an unruly clientele that refuses to obey the Empire’s curfew. Also on hand? The Carol Burnett Show’s Harvey Korman, and Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia singing the lyrics to John Williams’ main Star Wars theme. Yes, it has lyrics.

  

 

8. The Terrence Malick Connection

At his AFI Award ceremony in 2005, George Lucas acknowledged how few films he’s actually made and suggested that Terrence Malick, then having made only three movies, should take heart that he could still win an AFI Award himself. But there’s a deeper connection. In The Star Wars Holiday Special the Wookiees celebrate Life Day at “The Tree of Life.” And the villain of Knights of the Old Republic is Darth Malak, pronounced just like Malick. Coincidence? I think not.

  

 

9. The Emperor Has Two Sons With Three Eyes

The most Byzantine, bizarre look at that Galaxy Far, Far Away ever was geared strictly for the under-12 set: a compendium of six novellas released in 1992 and ‘93 by Paul and Hollace Davidsthat included talking whales and the reveal that the name of Jabba’s father is Zorba. But the weirdest revelation was that the Emperor actually had a three-eyed son named Triclops…not to be confused with the three-eyed pretender Trioculus who tried to steal Triclops’ birthright.

  

 

10. Ziro the Hutt

A purple Hutt deliberately modeled on Truman Capote, according to supervising direcdtor Dave Filoni, Ziro is the bitchy, sexually ambiguous yin to Jabba’s macho-gangster yang on The Clone Wars. Prone to overheated dialogue like “The cage that imprisons me also imprisons our love” Ziro had a torrid affair with nightclub chanteuse Sy Snootles, one of Star Wars’ great femme fatales, and earned some epic prison tats during a stint in the Republic slammer.

  

11. Ziro the Hutt’s Mother

Okay, so Ziro may be weird. But nothing — nothing, I tell you! — can prepare you for the epic grotesque that is Ziro’s mother, usually referred to as Mama the Hutt. She’s straight out of a John Waters film: morbidly obese, totally androgynous, living in filth, having parasites crawling over her body, given to saying things like “Break in mah house will ya, smaht guy?” It’s the greatest role Divine never played.

  

 

12. Derrown

The all-time greatest episode of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Season 4’s “The Box,” introduced one of the funkiest aliens we’ve ever seen since Luke and Obi-Wan first set foot in the Mos Eisley Cantina a long time ago in 1977: Derrown, a hovering, tentacled, ammunition-belt-wearing bounty hunter with a mushroom-shaped head, capable of only speaking in Beaker-like bleeps and bloops. The best.