Star Wars: 15 Things The Movies Stole From The Expanded Universe

4. Lots Of Background Prequel Elements Are Lifted From Droids

The mid-eighties cartoon Droids was already pretty out-of-step with the Star Wars continuity even before it and the rest of the EU was labelled non-canon. It was, after all, a mid-eighties cartoon; all bright ideas, cheap-ish animation and randomised plots. But that doesn't mean it didn't leave some impact on the movies; a lot names and ideas wound up informing the prequels.

Explicitly there's Bogden, the planet whose moon is where Jango says he was commissioned for the Clone Army, which was visited in an episode, one that also featured a villain called Kybo Ren, which is incredibly close to Ben Solo's assumed title (although the genesis of that may be a merging of Skywalker and Solo, similar to Dark Lord of the Sith).

There's also an awful lot of reused or otherwise appropriated names and ideas. R2-D2 and C-3PO visit the Boonta Speeder Race (the pod-race in The Phantom Menace is the Boonta Eve Classic), a 50s-esque diner owned by a four armed creature (like Dexter Jettster's in Attack Of the Clones), a planet littered with holes in the ground (like Utapau's sinkholes in Revenge Of The Sith) and meet a guy who rides a wheel bike (near identical to Grievous' in Sith).

Given that several names from the show were also lifted for EU expansions of characters (the unlucky podracer Ben Quadinaros' speics, Toong, was first referenced in Droids, as was the surname of Ben Burtt's Phantom Menace cameo character, Baobab), it's likely these come from people on the production crew, working in old ideas in homage.