Nearly two months ago, a child came into our lives. And we haven’t been the same since. It’s nearly legend at this point: The last few moments of The Mandalorian’s premiere, when the hero finds the target he was looking for the entire episode—and it turns out it’s an adorable little elf creature, clearly of the same species of the backward-speaking Yoda from the original Star Wars trilogy. Baby Yoda! we dubbed the little guy.
Baby Yoda has become such a pop culture fixation since then, that naming him Baby Yoda—and not the definitively less-cute “The Child,” as he’s identified in the show—feels as correct as saying there’s a Disney+ show called The Mandalorian in the first place.
Last night at the Golden Globes, Jon Favreau, The Mandalorian’s creator, and Taika Waititi, who voiced nurse droid IG-11 and directed the Season One finale, kindly reminded us that we’re disrespecting the green tyke.
When The New York Times asked Waititi about baby-who-must-not-be-named, he said, “He’s not named Baby Yoda!” and that the baby does have a name, he knows what it is, and that he’ll “wait for Favreau to give that away.”
On his end, Favreau reminded USA Today that since The Mandalorian takes place after Return of the Jedi, The Child is definitely not an infant Yoda, who is a Force Ghost at that point. Then, he proceeded to pour a big bucket of meanie juice on the Baby Yoda name, saying, “It’s the easiest, shortest, most hashtagable way to identify that character, which is identified in the episode as ‘The Child.'”
So what will Favreau pull from the big book of baby names? It definitely seems like the reveal of The Child’s name will be more than just a fill-in-the-blank for IMDb, and it’ll have some implications for the plot itself. Hopefully we’ll see when The Mandalorian returns for Season Two.
Via Esquire