A closer look
George Lucas came up with the seemingly futuristic name for the beloved Star Wars astromech droid R2-D2 when he overheard a sound editor asking for a specific piece of film labeled Reel Two, Dialog Two on a previous movie set. He literally just liked the rhythmic, technical sound of the completely mundane studio abbreviation and jotted it down in a notebook to casually use later in his massive space opera script. It is phenomenally anti-climactic to learn that the most famous robot in the history of science fiction, a character supposedly built a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, was actually named after an exhausted audio technician’s request for a random spool of audio tape. Die-hard nerds have spent half a century trying to decipher the deep mythological lore of the Skywalker saga, while the creator was out there naming major structural elements of the universe after basic filing cabinet vocabulary
