Here's a fun bit of trivia regarding Star Wars: The Force Awakens: the tiny ball-droid who's already stolen the hearts of every living soul on the Internet was apparently based on early concept art of another famous droid, R2-D2. Here's an image of the two side by side, and while the sketch doesn't look exactly like what's in the trailer, this is how Star Wars artist Ralph McQuarrie once described his vision for R2 [via Slashfilm]:
“I think Artoo was just described as a small robot. I thought of him as running on a giant ball bearing — just a sphere, a circle, wheel-like. He had gyros so he could go in any direction on this ball.”
Yup, definitely sounds a lot like this little guy...
It's already well known that when Disney first acquired the Star Wars brand and began to plan out its future, it immediately went back to Ralph McQuarrie's old designs from the original trilogy for inspiration. We've already seen a ton of McQuarrie's art all over the animated show Star Wars Rebels, with a good example being this look at the character Zeb next to the sketch that inspired his creation: McQuarrie's original design for Chewbacca.
In the hours following the Force Awakens trailer debut, our ball-droid pal has become quite the online sensation. Here's some fan-made art featuring old bally and Baymax from Big Hero 6 [via]...
And even though we see the little guy for all of about five seconds, some dude thought that was enough to get the character permanently inked onto his skin [via Buzzfeed].
Looks like we already know who the real star of the movie will be...
