Top 10 Rejected BB-8 Concepts
BB-8 didn’t start as a cute loveable spherical droid. Like Kylo Ren, BB went under a major evolution from the first doodle on a Hooter’s napkin to what we saw live on-stage at Celebration Anaheim over the weekend. Hit the jump to see the rejected designs of our favorite soccer ball droid.
The very first idea was for a house keeping droid that would act as a motherly influence for Rey. The Mrs. Doubtfire-bot was well received until JJ noted the character looked too much like a robot from his favorite Hanna-Barbara cartoon, The Jetsons.
This little beauty made it all the way to the prop department to start making working models. As it turns out, Daisy Ridley is a huge Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fan and was the first to recognize this as a blatant ripoff of Baxter Stockman’s Mouser drones.
This was a joke aimed at Bob Iger. Upon JJ’s request, the prop department made a full-scale Wall-E model that was controlled via wireless Bluetooth remote. JJ wheeled this guy into Iger’s office and said, “Meet Kira’s new droid!” Iger, confused, said, “Who the hell is Kira?”
One of the a-holes in the character design department was a big Doctor Who fan. Notice I said was. The “creator” of this concept, used JJ’s personal credit card to order 100 action figures of this guy labeling them MSTRB-8. JJ was pissed and ol’ John Doe was fired.
Meet BB-Max. The result of putting an inflatable sex doll inside of a soccer ball. Even though JJ didn’t see Big Hero 6, he knew an inflatable robot wasn’t original. Just look at all those old Power Rangers kaiju bots that blow up!
Whatever happened to Robot Jones? Well, I’ll tell you. The creator of the show was “hired” by LucasFilm and he presented Jones to JJ. Like everyone on the production team assumed, JJ hated the idea, then realised he never hired the guy. Security was called shortly thereafter.
This next idea was for a droid that wears Boba Fett armor posing as the bounty hunter. Sylvester Stallone caught wind of it and replaced the actual concept art with this fan mashup art of Futurama’s Bender dressed as Fett. JJ was not pleased with the artist.
Here we have one of JJ’s favorites. A droid that looked human but lacked emotion and had to learn how to feel from someone with flesh and blood. As JJ isn’t a fan of Star Trek, he never watched The Next Generation to discover Commander Data. Simon Pegg’s daughter called them out on this one.
This design was Bob Iger’s favorite. It has a secret compartment for hiding lightsabers, lifesavers, lifeboats, and lifelines. It wasn’t until Iger tried to file a patent on the real life model did they discover this was a vacuum cleaner robot from Teletubies.
JJ was pushing really hard for his own creation to be Rey’s droid sidekick. They went as far as casting motion-capture expert, Andy Serkis, to act as and voice BB-8. When Kathleen told JJ they couldn’t have Bad Robot’s mascot as a character in Star Wars, JJ literally stormed off and wasn’t seen for hours. Andy was re-cast as Kylo Ren’s master Darth Arcan later in production.
Honorable Mention:
This little droid with wheels and a ball sack courtesy of MakingStarWars.
