With just under a month till the release of ‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’, Entertainment Weekly has introduced yet another fuzzy buddy to the film’s ever-growing lineup of creatures, one that, along with the ‘porg’, will market well and continue to fill Disney’s exorbitant bank account. It’s called a ‘vulptex’ and it closely resembles that of a fox made of crystal. Standing still, it looks like a statue that you’d see on your grandmother’s shelf.
We all know the porg, how could we forget, right? Since the announcement that they’d be in the film back in August, these little avians have stolen all the thunder. As a recap, these are a species of sea bird native to the planet Ahch-To, which houses that of Luke Skywalker (and now also Rey, Chewbacca and R2-D2 as well).
These ‘vulptices’ can be found on Crait, a planet that used to serve as a Rebel hideout from the original trilogy, but one that is also extremely rich in minerals. Neal Scanlan, who spearheads the Star Wars Creature Shop, shed a little light on these creatures. They burrow into crevasses and abandoned structures, while navigating the salt flats on the planet. “The idea is that these wonderful sort-of-feral creatures had lived on this planet and had consumed the planet’s surface, and as such, had become crystalline,” said Scanlan. He went on to credit the design inspiration thanks in part to crystal glass chandeliers, which offer, “the sort of luminosity and elements of refraction (they create).”
The creatures themselves were designed by Aaron McBride, who derived the name from a Pablo Hidalgo story for LucasFilm, in which he galacticized ‘vulpes’, which is the Latin word for ‘fox’.
Our estimate is that Disney and LucasFilm will aim to introduce a lot of new species, as well as bring back some old ones, in the new sequel, which was one of the few cons about ‘The Force Awakens’.
