Today, for May the Fourth, let’s revisit these minor Star Wars characters.
Of course, some are more minor than others — so we’ve ranked them from least to most important.
Here we go! May the fourth be with you.
12 — Kitster Banai
Anakin’s friend in Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace has one of the all-time greatest Star Wars names. He delivered the impossibly uncool line, “This is so wizard, Ani” — and absolutely nailed it.
He isn’t especially important, except to establish that Anakin was once a semi-normal child with normal pals.
And no, the guy on the left is not a young Greedo. We checked. His name is Ward.
Now on to our next not-very-important minor Star Wars character.
11 — Tey How
Tey How is known for one line: “They’ve gone up the ventilation shaft!”
Tey How spoke that line in Star Wars: Episode One — The Phantom Menace, resulting in a flood of memes highlighting the laziness of the ventilation shaft trope, the dodgy delivery, and Tey How’s general purposelessness.
But devout Star Wars sleuths at some point realized that Tey How — who is not named in the film but is in the credits — had a backstory, revealed in a Phantom Menace novelization written by Terry Brooks and released a month before the film arrived in theaters.
Aside from the “ventilation shaft” line, Tey How’s very modest claims to minor Star Wars characters fame includes working for the Trade Federation, activating a droid army, and getting killed, along with many others onboard the Battleship Vuutun Palaa, by young Anakin Skywalker.
10 — Hammerhead
Hammerhead was one of our favorite Star Wars action figures in the 1970s. We didn’t know anything about him except that he had a hammerhead, and that was cool. The fact that someone like him existed told us all we needed to know about the endless mystery and possibility of this galaxy far, far away.
Of course Star Wars tried to go and ruin it by giving him a name, Momaw Nadon, and a backstory. A fan site explains that in 1989’s Galaxy Guide 1: A New Hope, a Star Wars Legends sourcebook, whatever that is, revealed that he had been exiled from his home world for revealing agricultural secrets to the Empire in order to save his planet of hammerhead beings. He was also a sensitive soul who maintained a secret garden and sympathized with the Rebellion.
Hey: Not every character needs a backstory! Some, like Hammerhead, were perfect from the start.
He did serve a purpose though, even without a backstory: He helped establish that the galaxy was full of a very wide range of life forms.
9 — Walrus Man
Walrus Man was a fascinating conundrum when the original Star Wars came out in 1977: He was a character important enough to have an action figure, but not important enough to have a name. Despite a tragic run-in with Luke Skywalker, he was the most perfectly minor of minor Star Wars characters.
But because the Star Wars industrial complex is unwilling to let sleeping banthas lie, he was eventually given an unnecessary backstory and an actual name, Ponda Baba.
To us he will always bear the name bestowed upon him by Kenner: Walrus Man.
8 – Bossk
HIs name is Bossk, he’s a bounty hunter. If he’d been a little quicker or smarter he might have captured Han Solo instead of Boba Fett and would not have his own show on Disney+. Though the way things are going, every single character on this list will eventually have their own show on Disney+.
He shows up for a few seconds in Empire Strikes Back, and that’s all we need. He’s great.
But yes, he has a backstory: Apparently he was partners with Boba Fett and Dengar,.
His main purpose is setting a tone, letting us know that the bounty hunters pursuing Han Solo are some tough-looking dudes.
7 – Salacious Crumb
This Jabba the Hutt toady is a fake-looking puppet who gets in a fight with C-3PO and R2-D2, but also has one of the best Star Wars names.
He’s important because in his sheer obsequiousness he establishes that Jabba is very much a Hutt to be feared.
6 – The Clumsy Storm Trooper
One of the greatest delights of watching the original 1977 Star Wars, pre-internet, was wondering if you and your friends were the only people in the entire world who noticed that one Storm Trooper bumping his head.
Best of all, the head bump occurs at the exact moment some static crackles over a radio, as if the sound were deliberately synced to the head bump.
Of course the clumsy Storm Trooper is now a meme, but we liked it better when he just belonged to us.
Is he important at all? We’d say yes. He helps set the tone of Star Wars, where things almost never go as planned and everyone is at least a little flawed.
5 — Dak
First, a million bonus points for having the best Star Wars name ever. Dak (John Fass Morton) didn’t need to do anything else but hang out and have the name Dak, but Luke’s Hoth gunner went ahead and also delivered one of the best/corniest/most ironic of all Star Wars lines:
“Right now I feel I can take on the whole Empire myself.”
Sadly, he spoke these words in The Empire Strikes Back just a few minutes before being shot down and crushed by an AT-AT’s giant metal foot. His death establishes very quickly the serious stakes of The Empire Strikes Back, where the good guys don’t always win. Or even live.
4 — Sabé
One of the cool things about Phantom Menace was the idea that Padmé, like Saddam Hussein, used doubles to confuse people. Her main double as Queen Amidala was Sabé, one of her handmaidens, played by future big star Keira Knightley. That’s pretty cool.
Sabé is the extremely rare Star Wars character we might like to know more about, given the bravery and thanklessness of her job.
3 – Greedo
Greedo has one job in the original Star Wars: to get shot by Han Solo, thereby establishing Han as a take-no-prisoners tough guy.
Unfortunately, George Lucas lost the stomach for Han Solo preemptively killing someone in the years after the 1977 release of A New Hope, and when the film was re-released in the 1990s, he added a much-criticized laser beam firing from Greedo’s gun to ret-con the notion that Greedo fired first.
But real Star Wars fans know the facts: Han Solo is a stone-cold killer. And we like it that way. Diehard fans will be able to see the original Greedo scene when a rare print of the 1977 Star Wars screens next month at the British Film Institute’s Film on Film Festival.
2 — Mon Mothma
Congratulations to Mon Mothma on being one of four (4) women with speaking roles in the original Star Wars trilogy.
Yes, that’s correct — four.
The others were Princess Leia, Aunt Beru, and an unnamed Rebel on Hoth in Empire Strikes Back. Mon Mothma, played by Caroline Blakiston, had a nobility and grace in her brief moments onscreen.
She was later given a part in Rogue One and the current Disney+ series Andor to try to bring her out of the ranks of minor Star Wars characters.
1 – Gunnery Captain Bolvan
When C-3PO and R2-D2, courier of the secret plans to blow up the Death Star, flee in an escape pod early in Star Wars: A New Hope, Bolvan very stupidly orders a gunnery officer fellow Imperial not to shoot their pod.
“Hold your fire. There’s no life forms. It must have short-circuited,” he stupidly says.
His poor judgment allows R2-D2 to get the plans to Obi-Wan Kenobi, who ultimately gets them to the Rebels, who use them to — you guessed it — blow up the Death Star.
One could make the case that his stupidity — and the resulting catastrophe for the Empire — makes Bolvan one of the most important Star Wars characters, not one of the most minor Star Wars characters. But nah.
Liked This List of Minor Star Wars Characters, Ranked From Least to Most Important?
You may also like our list of every Star Wars movie, ranked, which references a few very minor Star Wars characters but mostly very major ones.