The Wacky 'Star Wars: Droids' Cartoon That 'Predicted' Kylo Ren And Rey

For a long time, the idea of Boba Fett or Obi-Wan Kenobi having their own big-budget live-action TV shows sounded as implausible as George Lucas' dialogue.

In the '80s, Star Wars fans had to content themselves with miserable scraps like The ABC Sneak Peek and Fun Fit Test with Tony Danza, C-3PO, and R2-D2, which consisted of 23 minutes of Artoo, Threepio, and a dude in a thick Brooklyn accent giving kids tips about staying in shape while promoting the droids' upcoming cartoon (but, sadly, not a spin-off about Danza as a space cabbie).

The Star Wars: Droids cartoon itself wasn't terribly interesting, despite occasional guest appearances from familiar names like Boba, the bounty-hunting droid IG-88, or ... Kybo Ren? That sounds like a deliberate typo on an off-brand Halloween costume line also featuring characters like "Dark Bader" or "Luke Heavenpedestrian," but no, Kybo Ren is a real character who predates Kylo Ren by 30 years. Both wear black helmets, both are (or at least start off as) evil, and ... Okay, those are the only similarities here.

What's more interesting is a character called Kea Moll, a young woman the Droids run into while stuck in one of those backwater desert planets that apparently make up 90% of the galaxy. Kea is a skilled pilot and mechanic, a brave anti-Empire fighter, and her name sounds like two of the names initially considered for Rey ("Kira" and "Thea") smashed together. Oh, and her whole introduction scene is pretty similar to Rey's in The Force Awakens: both show up with their faces obscured by goggles and a scarf, but then they remove them, and you're like, "*gasp* A woman? In my Star War?!" (5:27 in the video below.)

Kea appeared in four episodes and Kybo in two, but they never interacted, so they never got to share the awkward romantic tension that existed between their near-namesakes in the sequel movies. But, you're definitely wondering, have they ever hooked up in fan-fic stories? We'll never know because we're afraid to look at that stuff. 

Another curiosity about the Droids show was that its comic book spin-off had an official crossover with the Ewoks comic, which involved Artoo and Threepio falling into a time portal. This was done because Droids took place years before the first Star Wars movie and Ewoks took place after, so if they just showed the characters interacting with no explanation, then Skywalker Ranch would have been flooded with letters full of nerdy complaints and possibly poop. This crossover foreshadowed one of the prequels' major revelations: the fact that everyone (including the Ewoks) has a terrible memory when it comes to keeping track of which Droids they've already met before.

If J.J. Abrams and company did look at the Droids series while creating Rey, it's too bad that they didn't dig deep enough to reach this comic. If they had, then obviously, they would have used the time portals to explain that Rey is actually a time-displaced Kea instead of using the much more ridiculous origin they went with. Too bad. Anyway, here's R2-D2 breakdancing.

Follow Maxwell Yezpitelok's heroic effort to read and comment on every '90s Superman comic at Superman86to99.tumblr.com. 

Top image: Lucasfilm