The Millenium Falcon was originally built by winged porpoises.
In 1977, after Star Wars had debuted, George Lucas created a story bible for licensors and novelists in the weirdest way possible-- he dictated the backstories about C-3PO, Princess Leia, and Han Solo in character. These were then transcribed and bound up. Some of the info from these survived into canon after an incredible amount of time-- I think about how C-3PO claims that, after falling apart in the extreme climates of the "Outland areas", he was reassembled by a young boy working for a junk dealer1-- but lots of it was never realized and overwritten by Lucas himself or the later Expanded Universe.
Case in point, the Millennium Falcon. Here's Lucas's own words:
"It's of Corellian design, from Crell2, and is used primarily by the Corellian spice shippers. They transport their goods to the center of the Empire.
The Corellian ship is a very easy ship to know. It's a very simple ship, very economical ship, although the modifications he made to it are rather extensive mostly to the navigation system to get through hyperspace in the shortest possible distance (par-sects).
"Crell is a rather grim planet, mostly gaseous. There's no surface to it. The cities are large satellites and they float inside the planet, like in the fog, or in the gas. *The inhabitants have wings and can fly. They are like porpoises with wings, but they also have claw-like hands."
Crell would eventually metamorphose into Bespin-- and pictured above are, in fact, concepts by Joe Johnston for flying whales that would populate the Bespin skies. Eventually these designs would make it into canon as the Aiwha, the flying semiaquatic whales that ridden by the Kaminoans in Attack of the Clones.
-
I don't have any love for the idea that Anakin Skywalker built C-3PO, but I do find it really charming imagining George Lucas, who has for 30 years known only in his heart that somewhere in Threepio's past he was built by a little junk boy, suddenly setting down his pencil and gasping, "But what if Anakin was that little junk boy!"
-
"Monsters of the Id!"
