I remember when I first saw a trailer for Star Wars: The Last Jedi and seeing a porg in the middle of it, I thought “What the hell is that thing?”

I sure I’m not the only person who’s jaded and annoyed with all the things stuffed into Star Wars as shameless cash grabs. I’m also sure I wasn’t the only 1 who thought porgs would be this generation’s Ewoks or worse, Jar Jar Binks.

While porgs did turn out to be a source of comedic relief in The Last Jedi they did so without being really annoying or racist like Jar Jar Binks. I mean there’s a part in Last Jedi where Chewbacca is cooking and eating couple of them, and also there was supposed to be a part where the porgs were messing around with Luke’s lightsaber only for them to activate it while one is staring down the hilt and getting his head lightsabered off.

According to an article I found on Cracked.com the origins of the porgs were this. In real life, the island that served as Luke’s home while he was in self-exile is inhabited by a native-species of birds called puffins who were all the over the place. Now since physically relocating them was impossible and because going the dodo route and wiping them out of the would have brought down a shitstorm on them, the guys at Disney decided just to paint over them and turn them into porgs.

I’m sure you’re probably thinking, “Why turn them into porgs? Why not just edit them out?”According to Cracked one of the designers said that “digitally removing them is an issue,” which Cracks theory is that the issue is there “would have been no porg memes and toys to sell,” which is a pretty convincing theory.

Another thing we wouldn’t have if we didn’t have porgs is this video I found online. Animated by Julian Leupold and featuring 3D models of porgs by Taiga, this video shows a couple porgs dancing to a remix of the Cantina Band song by Beaterie.

I kind of wish this video was longer but according to the description just doing this 25 seconds took 26 hours to do.

Anyway enjoy this video. Hopefully it will hold you over while I work on getting some other stuff up.

Also if you want to see more of Julian Leupold’s work check out his site leupsi.com and while you’re at it, check out more of Beaterie’s work at beaterie.com.

Porgs — Dancing to Cantina Band from Leupsi on Vimeo.