Sometimes the origins of famous things is pretty mundane.
The Rock Group named their band AC/DC when the guitarist saw that on the back of his mom's old sewing machine and though....hey thats a great name for a band.

I remember looking at a head less r2 unit in the sfx workshop in elstree many many years ago and thinking WTF is that for
Bit of trivia i can remember going to a hardware and my dad to buy spoons/forks and strange kitchen implements that he then spot welded on to the arms of some spidery looking robot

when luke buys r2 that robot was in the line up ......happy days

I think the headline should be "How Did R2-D2 Get Its Name?"

Droids don't have a gender.

(I'm kidding, of course)

Kinda like The Misfits song "We are 138" comes from the Lucas film THX-1138.

And John Milners Deuce Coupe is registered as THX-138 in American Graffiti...

"Rumor has it..."

So how did C3P0 get his name then?

Well done fellas, good to see you're breaking 15yrs old news.

"george lucas" poses an good question. Here's what I found after a bit of googling...

C3PO was named after a post office which is located at reference C3 on a map of Lucas' hometown.

http://www.funtrivia.com/askft/Question48321.html

Interesting, if true.

I've always thought of R2D2 as a "she" really..

Actually he was in a radio station with a friend who was a D.J and heard him ask for R1-D2 -> Row 2 - Disc 2...

@Rick

Nothing to do with the fact that Angus Young is gay then?

Nice find. Shame about the big mofo add though. Kind of like answering the phone during sex.

His could be referring to a male or female.

Wait! What! Darth Vader was Lukes FATHER!


Whoa!

I would take this out from the cool section.

not that it matters, but slightly interesting is the fact that the "andr" part of android does specifically mean male - from the greek "andros"

see wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android

Pretty cool. C3PO got his name from Darth Vader, who built him. I think Darth was smoking some of the death sticks and came up with C's name.

Wow - that's real breaking news. Especially if you ignore that it was in "Skywalking", the unofficial George Lucas biography about 20 years ago.

"Droids don’t have a gender."

Well, actually, R2D2 is a ball-bearing robot...

That's nothing. Obi Wan Kenobi owes its name to the synthesizer used to create R2D2's "voice" - the Oberheim OB-1. Pics & info here: http://www.vintagesynth.com/oberheim/ob1.shtml

Come on guys... it clearly states..."I came across an interesting bit of Star Wars trivia that I had never known before"...

We might have known it, but he didn't know it and thought it cool to post to others who didn't know it. Give the guy a break.

I appreciate the post. While it may be old information im sure alot of people who read it, read it because they didn't know it. Its the first time I heard of it.

Peace

This isn't news, it's been common knowledge for years!

I love this kind of stuff. Some people may have already known but I didn't and I'm a movie trivia freak. Thanks! Have you ever heard of or seen the Star Wars Holiday Special? Anyone hardcore into Star Wars needs to see it, a large portion of the opening is entirely in Wookie with no subtitles. It's beyond amazing.

Did you know Indiana was named after the dog? LOL.

I'm a huge Star Wars buff but never knew this - who cares if it's 20 years old? It's still cool as hell... it's STAR WARS.

Intelligence bit of star wars intlligence. You have broken the heart of my neighbor who considers himself on the best informed and biggest star wars fans their is.

haha this is what you consider "common knowledge"?? this is thankfully not part of my common knowledge... i guess i missed that unofficial george lucas biography from 20 years ago?

Rootman Says:

"Wait! What! Darth Vader was Lukes FATHER! Whoa!"

Jesus Christ, use some f'ing spoiler tags next time. Way to ruin the ending for me.

You know, if you watch the movies starting from Episode I to Episode VI, you already know that Darth Vader is Luke's father. How lame would that be if you watched the movies in that order for the first time?

And Washington DC was named in honor of the capitol of the ancient world, Washington BC.

Still looking for the jump...

Oh! after the fold.

Right.

Jump is a link, people...

heh that's pretty nifty.

@robis: which is why you'd watch them in this order: IV-V-I-II-III-VI. Set up, revelation, back story, redemption.

I think some of you are missing the point. While the story of R2D2's naming has been well known for years, this is the first photo of the actual american grafitti reel (as far as I'm aware of).

interesting trivia: R2D2 in spanish takes too long to say so in mexico's translation they called him ^arturito^ which is like litte arthur in english

“Droids don’t have a gender.”

R2D2 is no "Droid", C3PO on the other hand is.
Droid is abbreviated form of Android, from the greek "Human-like-form" (i.e. 2 arms, 2 legs, torso, head)

so there...

The name "Wookiee" came from THX-1138 also. Listen to the radio chatter as they are stealing the police cars. One of the voice actors ad-libs the line, "I think I just drove over a wookiee back there". Again, Lucas liked it and wrote it down for later.

I heard that R2D2 was named after a Rainbow series 2 vacuum which his mother used. If you look at the design of R2D2, it looks very similar to the design of a late 50's canister vacuum.

I don't know this to be true, but that's what I heard.

Cool... thanks for C3PO one. Any idea why Z6PO has been chosen in the French version?

Such a humble beginning for the most famous druid in the world.

I gotta say.. who doesn't know r2d2 stands for reel 2 dialogue 2? Why make a site about it and digg it... I just... I could make eleventy billion websites with my knowledge... I can't believe one piece of commonly known trivia and it has it's own url, and the biggest insult is that there is a date on the article... like this is news or something argh

it doesnt matter. it looks like vacuum cleaner anyway..

@Rookie: it doesnt matter. it looks like vacuum cleaner anyway..

Funny, I just had the same reflexion. A kind of vacuum-transformer...

Wizard of OZ was named OZ because the author was sitting in front of the filing cabinet with the bottom drawer labeled O-Z.

Star Wars is just awesome!

r u kidding me?

I heard that on TV in a program about authors.

Simpsons Reference Number 1: This just reminds me of "Max Power? Cool name" "Hehe, thanks. I got it off a hairdryer"

Simpsons Reference2 : This sounds so much like Comic Book Guy it's unreal...
"Andras Says:
Wow - that’s real breaking news. Especially if you ignore that it was in “Skywalking”, the unofficial George Lucas biography about 20 years ago."

Look for this on:
http://www.c2i.ntu.edu.sg/AI+CI/Humor/AI_Jokes/...
It describes the real source of the name.

Once upon a time there was a robot, named R1 by its creators. Its only task was to fend for itself. One day its designers arranged for it to learn that its spare battery, its precious energy supply, was locked in a room with a time bomb set to go off soon. R1 located the room, and the key to the door, and formulated a plan to rescue its battery. There was a wagon in the room, and the battery was on the wagon, and R1 hypothesized that a certain action which it called PULLOUT(WAGON, ROOM) would result in the battery being removed from the room. Straightaway it acted, and did succeed in getting the battery out of the room before the bomb went off. Unfortunately, however, the bomb was also on the wagon. R1 knew that the bomb was on the wagon in the room, but didn't realize that pulling the wagon would bring the bomb out along with the battery. Poor R1 had missed that obvious implication of its planned act.

Back to the drawing board. "The solution is obvious," said the designers. "Our next robot must be made to recognize not just the intended implications of its acts, but also the implications about their side-effects, by deducing these implications from the descriptions it uses in formulating its plans." They called their next model, the robot-deducer, R1D1. They placed R1D1 in much the same predicament that R1 had succumbed to, and as it too hit upon the idea of PULLOUT(WAGON, ROOM) it began, as designed, to consider the implications of such a course of action. It had just finished deducing that pulling the wagon out of the room would not change the colour of the room's walls, and was embarking on a proof of the further implication that pulling the wagon out would cause its wheels to turn more revolutions than there were wheels on the wagon ... when the bomb exploded.

Back to the drawing board. "We must teach it the difference between relevant implications and irrelevant implications," said the designers, "and teach it to ignore the irrelevant ones." So they developed a method of tagging implications as either relevant or irrelevant to the project at hand, and installed the method in their next model, the robot-relevant-deducer, R2D1 for short. When they subjected R2D1 to the test that had so unequivocally selected its ancestors for extinction, they were surprised to see it sitting, Hamlet-like, outside the room containing the ticking bomb, the native hue of its resolution sicklied over with the pale cast of thought, as Shakespeare (and more recently Fodor) has aptly put it. "Do something!" they yelled at it. "I am," it retorted. "I'm busily ignoring some thousands of implications I have determined to be irrelevant. Just as soon as I find an irrelevant implication, I put it on the list of those I must ignore, and ..." the bomb went off.

Hi rodrigo,

here is a reference which I found:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099464/usercomments