For all the things that he has gotten wrong in his career as a mythmaker and world-builder and filmmaker and Extremely Satisfied-Seeming Beard-Haver, George Lucas has gotten the big things right. He’s seemingly constantly borne aloft on a cloud of oblivious self-regard, but also he created Star Wars, which means that the man invented a universe that many millions of people love, to the point where they are willing to wait in long lines, at malls, to revisit it. Lucas has, we can probably agree, not always been careful about how he populates this universe; I have no doubt that, if left to his own devices, the prequels would have been 75 percent parliamentary debate about trade treaties and 25 percent Hayden Christensen looking like a child who just dropped a comically oversized lollipop. But it’s his universe, so if George Lucas wants to fill that universe with characters that have goofy names debating galactic tariffs then that is very much his right.
As it turns out, George Lucas very much wants to do that. He loves his goofy George Lucas-ass names—clearly loves giving them, loves coming up with them, loves finding ways to make each dippier and more overdetermined than the last. For instance, here is a little glimpse into Lucas’s process where this work is concerned.
As it happens, coming up with whimsical names is one of the handful of things that Lucas has in common with the rest of humanity. For all the things that people have done to make life on earth inestimably worse in the last, uh, entirety of human history, we do currently seem to be living in something of a Name Renaissance. The strictures and stresses and oppressing structures of the world force us into ever smaller and more confining boxes, and we fight back by giving their children wild and expressive and aspirational names.
This sounds recuperative, and in some ways it is recuperative, but in point of fact what it means is that there are professional baseball players walking around with George Lucas-ass names like Jett Bandy and Scooter Gennett and Yonder Alonso. A George Lucas-ass name is not difficult to explain, really—it should tell you something about the character in an obvious way, it should be sort of musical and faintly space-inflected and generally make its mark heavy and dark. If alliteration is possible, then alliteration there must be. If you can embed some sort of goofy pun, go ahead and try to embed two goofy puns. Failing all that, it should be kind of a collection of sounds that George Lucas might consider imaginative. Try coming up with a few and see how easy it is to get on this wavelength. Von Torpeato. Cam Lasso. Case Keenum. It’s easy.
But also a George Lucas-ass name needs no explanation. You will know it when you see it, and while you can see them all over professional sports, there may be no richer source of George Lucas-ass names at this moment than in the NFL. While baseball is unquestionably at the bleeding edge of George Lucas-ass names at this moment—there is a minor leaguer named SKYE BOLT, for fuck’s sake—the NFL has been serving up some extremely tasty George Lucas names since the days when everyone in Major League Baseball was named Andy or Brian. Here, for your consideration, is a brief, incomplete list of some of the NFL’s most delightfully George Lucas-ass names:
- Whitney Mercilus
- JuJu Smith-Schuster
- Orleans Darkwa
- Chase Daniel
- Dak Prescott
- Trung Canidate (retired)
- Ha Ha Clinton-Dix
- Rex Burkhead
- Garrett Celek
- Lofa Tatupu (retired)
- Haloti Ngata
- Harrison Butker
- C.J. Prosise
- Barkevious Mingo
- Coby Fleener
- Vontaze Burfict
- Star Lotulelei
- Wes Welker (retired)