Star Wars Facts You Never Knew

Here are facts from Star Wars you won't have heard before:

Children reared as Jedi are called "younglings", but what are turtles reared as Jedi called?

That's right: Force-sensitive Terrapodlets

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After the loss of his hand, Luke Skywalker got a settlement from his Jedi health insurance. He used some of it to buy the parts for his new green lightsaber, and some of it on a better artificial hand, and he invested some of it on a nice holiday home off the coast of Ireland.

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Actor Harrison Ford was killed during The Empire Strikes Back. However, he was revived in the Return of full function of his heart

and central nervous system. The initial reason for his death - in Episode V - was so that George Lucas had his most successful actor "on-hold" for the sequel. Carbon-frozen in a technique borrowed from Walt Disney's head, Mr Ford was thawed out on a live set for the final movie in the original trilogy. In the deal with Disney's cryogenically-frozen head, it was agreed that hundreds of Disney teddy bears would be employed in what would become Return of the Jedi.

Cannily, director JJ Abrams also killed Ford during The Force Awakens shoot, by clamping a hydraulic door down on his head. Ford has been living in a greenscreen, ventilator-assisted, dream reality since the shoot, at a facility in the Nevada Desert, with electrodes attached to his skull and hooked up to Mr Abrams's Bad Robot technologies.

An insider said "When Ford's not unconscious, he causes trouble on set, bad-mouthing the scripts on publicity tours, and giving his fellow actors a difficult time. Does that sound okay as a quote? Will they believe that? Why can't you make up your own lies? Turn off your dumb voice-to-text thing."
 
He famously told George Lucas on the original movie: "You can write this shit but you can't say it," before repeatedly punching the visionary director in the cantina.

Another story has haunted the original cast: George Lucas planned to name the planet “Alderaan” not “Alderaan”, but in fact “Alderman”, after his great-great-great-grandfather, Chelmsford Lucas, who was the First Alderman of Nantucket. However, Mark Hamill, who played central character Luke Skywalker, struggled with the pronunciation of the word “Alderman” early on in the film’s shoot and subsequent references to the word ended up on the cutting room floor.

The problem was so pronounced that Lucas decided that the planet would have to be destroyed.

 

A purpose-built Death Star was introduced into the script in order to obliterate the planet, sending the movie sky-rocketing over budget and postponing the shoot by four months.

The delay led Lucas to the conclusion that any sequel containing a similar Death Star could only be financially viable if the massive weapon were only half built. Luckily, the success of Star Wars at the box office covered all the losses for the first movie. Co-star Harrison Ford later publicly humiliated Hamill about his inability to say the word alderman and as a consequence stalled his career.