During his appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! on Friday (March 17), Academy Award-winning filmmaker Guillermo del Toro (Pinocchio) was prompted by Kimmel to talk about his experience watching the Star Wars movies in Spanish as a kid.
Kimmel brought up a discussion he had with actor Diego Luna on the show last year when he was promoting his Disney+ series Andor. Luna, who shared the story with a few outlets, including Kimmel, mentioned that when he was a kid, he thought the character R2-D2 was really named Arturito.
“We in Mexico call R2-D2, we call it Arturito, you know, because it sounds close to R2-D2,” Luna said. “We call him Little Arthur. I grew up thinking he was called Little Arthur. You know, it took me a while to find out it was [R-2-D-2 in Spanish].”
When Kimmel asked del Toro if he thought the same thing, del Toro said, “100 percent.” However, R2-D2 wasn’t the only Star Wars character that del Toro was incorrectly pronouncing. He also believed that Chewbacca’s name was Masca Tobaco (chew tobacco).
“[Masca Tobaco] sounds like a sexual proposition from Antonio Banderas,” del Toro said. “Yeah! Why not? Let’s go, Antonio!”
Del Toro said he wasn’t sure if the reason he believed these characters had different names is because of incorrect English subtitling. He added that he never had any problems with other characters. “Hans Solo was Hans Solo. Luke Skywalker was Luke Skywalker,” he said. “But Masca Tabaco and Arturito, I don’t know why.”
See the discussion with Guillermo del Toro at the 3:37 mark in the video below.