Just like George R.R. Martin made some New York Giants, New England Patriots and Bill Belichick references in his A Song of Ice and Fire books, the Sound Editor on the latest Star Wars film, also incharge of inventing alien dialect, just had to insert players names from his favorite team into his bit, which means the Philadelphia Eagles will always be intertwined with the most successful movie ever made.
So you know Teedo? He’s a scavenger on Jakku, riding a luggabeast. At some point, BB-8 gets caught up in his net, and Rey rescues the cutest droid on the galaxy from a less endearing fate than he ended up with. Teedo (which is also the name of his alien race) is voiced by David Acord, who was also the Oscar-nominated sound editor of the film. And being a Philadelphia Eagles fan, he couldn’t help but turn an alien language into a name dropping occasion.
The language he speaks is inspired by some Thai phrases that I was trying to learn for an upcoming trip to Thailand. For fun, I peppered in a few Eagles’ player names and my wife’s name as well. You can hear ‘Celek’ and ‘Fletcher’ (as in Cox) if you listen carefully. I was also trying to pick names that fit the alien language I was designing. Unfortunately, ‘Donnie Jones’ doesn’t exactly scream otherworldly.
Acord also tried planting the names Barwin and Curry into the dialogue, but enough is enough, and he had to drop them.
Acord was nominated for best Sound Editing along with Matthew Wood for their work on Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The winner in that category like in almost all of the technical categories, came from Mad Max: Fury Road (Mark A. Mangini and David White).
Acord has been in the business for quite some time (since 1996) and has recently also worked on the Star Wars: Rebels TV show and was a sound designer on Avengers: Age of Ultron.