Star Wars: The Mandalorian’s Baby Yoda Has a Real Name According to Bob Iger

Baby Yoda is still flexing that epic hold on pop culture even after the release of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. Disney CEO Bob Iger joined The Star Wars Show to talk about everyone’s favorite tiny alien and what exactly the character’s name will be. Of course, he can’t give everything away, but the Disney head man reveals that he’s had a bunch of conversations with Jon Favreau about the biggest surprise from The Mandalorian. Iger was pretty far ahead of the curve because he knew Baby Yoda was coming. But, even the most positive outlooks for the flagship series on the Disney+ streaming platform couldn’t have forecasted all of this excitement. People are flipping out and wondering about who and why Baby Yoda is as much as the eventual mysteries about Mando itself. But, for now, Baby Yoda is on top of the world and those viewers can’t wait to learn more about it.

“The world is referring to the character as Baby Yoda, and that’s a no-no. I got chastised in my early emails to Jon Favreau for referencing Baby Yoda. It just seemed so easy. I got my wrists slapped a bunch of times by Jon. ‘It’s not Baby Yoda!’ Okay, okay. It doesn’t have to say anything, it just emotes. It moves he ears, and the eyes. So darn intriguing. People really wanted to know, what’s it’s name? What’s it’s real name? Do you know it’s real name by the way? I know it’s real name, and it is one of the reasons I’ve got all this extra security now. I don’t want to be given some kind of truth serum by someone.”

“We didn’t tell anyone about that character’s presence in the series or even the first episode. I know that there’s this feeling that it’s the holiday season and everyone wants to buy their child toys, etc. and so on. They’re not really out there and that’s because if we had given the design out to hundreds of thousands of people all over the world. We didn’t want to do that, so people will have to wait. Which I think is a good thing in this case.”

That surprise came up a lot when Iger talked to The Hollywood Reporter earlier this week. He feels like the success can only be a good thing for Star Wars going forward.

“Well, look, the scale of the reaction is probably beyond my expectations by a wide margin,” Iger explained. “That said, the moment I laid eyes on the character, I had a strong feeling the character was going to connect with audiences. It’s just so cute, so interesting, so compelling, in many respects so familiar and yet so new.”

“We talked about it, and we wanted the reveal of that character, notice I’m not referring to it as ‘Baby Yoda’ to be really special. And it was worth it.”