Yep, there’s a scene in a Star Wars movie where someone calls BB-8 a “Gundam.”

So I went to see The Last Jedi last weekend, and while I can understand where some of the fan complaints are coming from, overall I had a good time. The battle scenes were cool, the Porgs were adorable, and Luke Skywalker showed that just because he’s grizzled doesn’t mean he’s at all washed up.

That said, there was one thing I was massively disappointed about, which is that The Last Jedi was completely devoid of Gundam.

No, I wasn’t expecting the famous anime mecha to make an on-screen appearance, like he does in the upcoming Ready Player One. But what I was hoping for was to hear someone in a Star Wars movie say “Gundam” again, just like in The Force Awakens.

Don’t believe me? Take a listen here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6_zvQQ5P8w#t=7m39s

That scene shows an informant, who’s just spotted BB-8, speaking into a communicator, and since she’s not speaking English the subtitles “Inform the First Order…I’ve found the droid,” appear onscreen. However, in whatever alien language she’s speaking, the last word she says is pretty clearly “Gundam.” So assuming the language she’s speaking has a sentence structure that matches up with that of English, in the Star Wars universe “Gundam” is an alien word for “droid.”

Lending further credibility to this theory is that the scene takes place in the cantina owned by Maz Kanata, which is located on the planet Takodana, which Force Awakens director J.J. Abrams has personally said gets its name from a neighborhood in downtown Tokyo. “There is planet in the movie called Takodana,” Abrams said while on a trip to Japan to promote the film in 2015. “And I named it (as such) because the first time I came to Tokyo, we stayed in a hostel in Takodanababa.”

Considering that Abrams has enough affinity for Japanese pop culture that he wanted to cast a member of idol singer supergroup AKB48 in his Star Trek movies, inserting a subtle salute to anime’s most famous robot, especially one that linguistically connects it to the robots of the Star Wars universe, definitely seems like something the filmmaker would do.

Alas, our heroes don’t return to Takodana in The Last Jedi, and so no one says “Gundam” before the credits roll. Anime fans can still keep their fingers crossed for when Abrams returns to the director’s chair for 2019’s Star Wars Episode IX.

Reference: Spoon&Tamago, Today
Top image ©SoraNews24

Follow Casey on Twitter, where quite a lot of the linguistic concepts he thinks about are somehow related to anime robots.