Of all the fights in all the land, this one probably hurts the most. Why? Because it has our favorite little green friend at the center of it. I’m, of course, talking about Star Wars/The Mandalorian’s Grogu, affectionately known as “Baby Yoda,” who is apparently being accused of being a ripoff by Gremlins director Joe Dante. Not my little cookie-loving son!
The war over cute cuddly creatures is heating up Dante has now accused Star Wars of stealing the design of Baby Yoda from that of Gizmo, the cute fuzzy little guy from Gremlins. Obviously, this gets into tricky territory because cute things with big ears are not exclusive to the Gremlins movies or Grogu, but Disney has yet to comment on the comparison. But it does boil down to big ears and being cute.
“I think the longevity of [the films] is really key to this one character [Gizmo], who is essentially like a baby,” Dante told the San Francisco Chronicle of the star the Gremlins films. “Which brings me, of course, to the subject of Baby Yoda, who is completely stolen and is just out-and-out copied. Shamelessly, I would think.”
Now, here’s my argument: Baby Yoda is designed to look like a baby version of Yoda, who was created four years prior to Gremlins’ 1984 debut. So, if you want to start flinging accusations, then we could go back as far as saying that the small creature with large ears that got ripped off was the Jedi Master himself. But that’s probably not what the intention was, and it was also probably not the intention of the team behind Grogu. It’s just simply that they’re small, cute, and have big ears.
Like, okay, is Lilo & Stitch’s Stitch also a Gremlin ripoff, then? In fact, The Mandalorian series creator Jon Favreau has been pretty open about the inspiration for Grogu, he told Deadline that he actually was thinking about E.T. when creating him. “Dave [Filoni] had done a sketch of kind of a Michelangelo/E.T. moment, and that was a source of inspiration,” Favreau said.
Let all things be cute
The thing is: Why now? It’s not as if Grogu is a new thing. At this point, it’s been two years since the cute little green guy came into our lives, and it just feels like this beef is sudden when the reality is that he’s based on Yoda and has the same characteristics that the original character had, just baby-fied. My own personal opinion is that cuddly things should just exist in every medium. But if this ends up being a case where Lucasfilm did pull from Gizmo? … Okay? It’s not the first time people have taken inspiration from something else, and it won’t be the last, but it does feel like this is more of a “that cute thing sort of looks like my cute thing” fight than something that was intentional.
But if Gizmo and Grogu wanted to have a hangout and maybe eat cookies together? That’d be cute.
(featured image: Lucasfilm)
