5 Characters With Stupid Origin Stories Nobody Talks About

5

Greedo Only Wanted To Kill Han Solo Because Of A Dumb Love Triangle

Greedo is a lesson in screenwriting efficiency. In the span of one minute, he establishes that Han Solo is the sort of person who gets into debts with gangsters and makes enemies of killers, and that he can shoot his way out of trouble. It doesn't matter why Greedo hates Han, only that Han has sketchy enemies and no qualms about blasting them away.

But Star Wars has never met a plot that it couldn't overtell, so an official short story called "The Luckless Rodian" gives Greedo all the backstory you never wanted. In it, we learn that Greedo was obsessed with a woman named Uncelta, who was everything he "cherished" in a partner. But she was into Han Solo, and they hooked up before Han eventually broke her heart. So Greedo wanted to kill Han to avenge the feelings of a woman who never liked him, which is a pathetic love triangle more befitting a rambling Reddit post than a space opera. Oh, and Greedo got drunk before he confronted Han, just to add an extra layer of sadness to the scene.

Lucasfilm"Look at the shape of my mouth. I give insane oral. What can you offer her?"

Now, we know what you're thinking: Was Uncelta a human woman, or a member of Greedo's species? We do not know, and the matter is probably best not dwelt on.

4

Mark Hamill's Personal Backstory For Old Luke Skywalker Is Heartbreaking

Luke Skywalker has some rough golden years. His attempt to restore the Jedi Order ended with his nephew killing most of his acolytes and running off to be a Space Nazi, and ever since, he's moped around in isolation and self-pity, like the fantasy equivalent of your uncle who went through a tough divorce. Luke eventually does redeem himself and go out on a high note, but his road to redemption was even tougher than we thought. Mark Hamill invented his own backstory to motivate his world-weary portrayal of Luke that would make child cancer patients consider him unlucky.

LucasfilmYou know shit's gone bad when kissing your sister and watching your father die can be looked back on as "the good old days."

3

Bane Went To Jail As A Baby And Lost His Beloved Teddy Bear To A Shark

In The Dark Knight Rises, Bane shows up as a villain already so infamous that he's wanted by the CIA. It's explained that he's part of the League of Shadows, and that's a good enough reason for Batman to punch him. The movie gives him a backstory about being born and raised in the world's worst prison (which he eventually managed to climb out of, because it was also the world's worst-designed prison), but the exact circumstances as to how and why his pregnant mom went to super-jail are a vague myth. And that's probably because the more detailed version from the comics is very, very silly.

See, Bane's dad tried to overthrow the government of the small and fictional Santa Prisca, then fled because it went about as well as America's attempts to overthrow Castro. So the government threw his newborn son in prison instead. We're sure the guards loved the diaper years.

2

Jared From Silicon Valley Had A Childhood Full Of Unimaginable Horror

Silicon Valley's Jared is weird, but in a sweet way. He's the closest thing the show has to a morally minded adult in the room. He also drops a lot of hints that imply he had a childhood to rival a Bosnian War orphan. Fans have combined them with interviews and supplementary material to assemble a jigsaw puzzle of sadness.

In an interview with actor Zach Woods, he explains that he thinks of Jared as someone who achieved success by overcoming monumental trauma. Woods has written up a past for Jared that includes his parents dying in a seaplane crash, a series of terrible foster homes, and having to fight his stepdad's dogs to earn respect. That crash must have been after his biological father abandoned his family to join an Ozark militia, as Jared mentions on the show.

HBOWhich explains why his default facial expression is "desperately needs a hug."

1

Slimer Was A Dead Gangster Posthumously Mutilated By The Ghostbusters

The Ghostbusters movies are set in a world in which humanity has definitive proof of the afterlife and treats it like an angry raccoon they have to flush out from under the porch. In the first Ghostbusters, we're introduced to Slimer, a ghost who likes eating and not prompting anyone to question their fundamental understanding of the Universe. He exists solely to introduce us to the wacky ways ghosts operate, and he doesn't need a backstory because anyone old enough to form memories about Halloween knows what a ghost is. Dan Aykroyd dubbed him the "Ghost of John Belushi" as an in-joke tribute, and that alone is more than enough.

Columbia PicturesRemember, Dan Akroyd is the king of unnecessary backstory.

But because we now live in a world where no minor character can exist without fans demanding to know their complete biography, Slimer was given a detailed origin for his appearance in the Ghostbusters remake -- a movie everyone loves to have calm, rational discussions about.

Slimer was written as a gangster who killed a waiter for messing up his order, only to then be executed himself. He started as a regular old ghost, but when the Ghostbusters first tried to capture him with untested equipment, they accidentally blew off his legs, turned him green, and distorted him into the ravenous mutant potato that we all know and love. Because everyone knows that good comedy is murder and spectral disfigurement plus time.

Shockingly, the part where our fun heroines horrifically mutilate the ghost of a violent gangster somehow ended up getting cut, presumably along with a scene in which the gang has to bust the ghost of an elderly concentration camp survivor who died alone and unloved in her cold and empty apartment.

Mark is on Twitter and has a book.

Get to writing better origin stories yourself with a beginner's guide to Celtx.

Support Cracked's journalism with a visit to our Contribution Page. Please and thank you.

The 6 Most Half-Assed Superhero Origins Of All Time and 9 Incredibly Dumb Early Versions Of Iconic Characters.

Clicking this link is the origin of you following us on Facebook.