Return Of The Jedi Almost Made Mon Calamari A Punchline
While it couldn’t really hold a candle to the excellence of The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi remains one of the best sci-fi films ever made. For fans of this last Original Trilogy entry, there is always something new to discover, especially if you go to YouTube (the next best thing to the Jedi Archives) and look up the film’s deleted scenes. Case in point: the deleted footage has many lines from a Mon Calamari pilot (Ika Sulko) that would have made their entire species a joke, including uttering “fried Calamari tonight” as a battle cry.
Fried Calamari Tonight!
What’s fascinating about these Return of the Jedi deleted scenes is that they are hilariously rough…more equivalent to behind-the-scenes footage than something you could just pop back into the movie via a fan edit. For example, in the clips, you can actually hear director Richard Marquand feeding silly lines to Tim Rose, who is both the voice and puppeteer of this Mon Calamari pilot. While “fried Calamari tonight” is definitely the silliest of the lines, there are others that threaten to turn these aliens into a punchline.
For example, another line you can hear in this deleted Return of the Jedi footage is “all this technology and no men’s room.” While we can only guess the motivation behind this silly line, it is likely a joking reference to fans always wondering where the bathroom is in their favorite sci-fi shows.
Just ask your average Star Trek fan who has pored over various blueprints and technical manuals to discover where, exactly, the bathroom is on the bridge of the Enterprise-D in The Next Generation.
Some of these Return of the Jedi lines are just silly, including “I wish I could stop drooling.” One of the other weird lines from this Mon Calamari pilot is “boy are these humans weird.” While intended as a joke, this one would arguably have worked in-universe as we have established that people in a galaxy far, far away are often racists to aliens and even droids (“we don’t serve their kind here!”).
Referenced George Lucas
The most “meta” of these cut bits of Return of the Jedi dialogue is one that references the Maker himself, George Lucas. At one point, pilot Ilka Sulko says, “this is the last time I fly Lucas Air!” Enhancing all of these line deliveries are silly motions from the Mon Calamari pilot, adding a kind of body language to dialogue that is already pretty funny.
Plenty Of Deleted Scenes Out There
Incidentally, the story of these deleted scenes is almost more interesting than Return of the Jedi itself. Fans got to see this weird footage in 2011 during a Comic-Con International preview for the Star Wars: The Complete Saga Blu-Ray set. The character got his own action figure in 2012, but he wasn’t properly identified until the 2019 book Rebel Starfighters Owners’ Workshop Manual.
With all that being said, Ika Sulko still plays a major role in Return of the Jedi despite his character never appearing onscreen. You see, Tim Rose used the same Mon Calamari puppet to bring Admiral Ackbar to life. This character’s line delivery of “it’s a trap!” made him the stuff of Star Wars meme legend, but had this pilot footage made it into the movie, fans would most likely have spent the last four decades making “fried Calamari tonight” jokes instead.
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