While some prefer to see the character's name spelled phonetically as Artoo-Detoo, the fact is that the name was actually born out of a habit of Walter Murch, a film editor and sound designer who worked with George Lucas on THX 1138 and American Graffiti. When Murch was working on The Godfather he saw that fellow sound engineer Dick Portman would voice-slate every reel, shortening, for example, reel four, dialogue one to R4, D1 (you know where this is going). Murch picked this up, and when he announced the second dialogue premix for reel two of American Graffiti as R2, D2 it caught the attention of a near-by George Lucas who was working on a draft of what would eventually become his first Star Wars film. Up until that point, R2 was actually called A-2, and C-3PO was going under the name C-3. If that seems strange, then you might find it hard to believe that at one stage the Wookiees were called Jawas, Luke was a girl and Han was an alien. Now that Lucas has passed on the Star Wars reins, however, it falls to other people to come up with short and snappy names for droids, and they turn to very different inspirations. In fact, Episode VII director J.J. Abrams recently revealed how he came up with the name BB-8:
I named him BB-8 because it was almost onomatopoeia. It was sort of how he looked to me, with the 8, obviously, and then the 2 Bs.
