Set them up side-by-side and you’d be hard-pressed to spot the differences between Star Wars‘ IG-88 and IG-11. Sure, one is IG-77 more than the other one, but that’s hard to spot with the naked eye, and probably rude to bring up at dinner.
And sure, there are some physical differences between The Mandalorian’s IG-11 and The Empire Strikes Back’s IG-88. IG-11 has hands that look — painting with broad strokes — kind of like hands, while IG-88’s arms end in a pair of those things your grandpa used to pick his newspaper up off the ground. IG-11 has legs with extra texture to them, no doubt thanks to his infectious, never-skip-leg-day dedication to self-improvement. IG-88 couldn’t move around, on account of how he was a bunch of reclaimed pieces of old props, glued into the shape of a living thing and bolt-gunned to the floor of the set.
Even so, the similarities outweigh the differences. Both droids are killing/nannying machines, both droids have heads made out of scrapped Rolls Royce jet engines — you can spot the same piece being used as a drink dispenser in the cantina scene from New Hope — and both droids look like the creation of a kid who got an Erector Set for his birthday, played with it for ten minutes, then got bored.
In truth, there’s only a single major difference between IG-88 and IG-11: Dave Filoni couldn’t get yelled at over IG-11.
IG-11 vs. IG-88: Pragmatism in the Time of Space Wizards
If you’re not familiar, Dave Filoni is basically the old knight from the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade if he’d been guarding Star Wars instead of dishes and also had millions of faceless fans screaming at him on Twitter any time he rearranged the space. He spearheaded The Clone Wars, Rebels, and The Mandalorian, and most of the Star Wars things that you’ve liked since the late 2000s, as well as, you know. Other stuff.
One of the first lessons that you probably learn when you take over as Star Wars king is that people don’t like it when you mess with the story — the majority of the extended universe stuff from the ‘90s is borderline impenetrable, but people were still ready to riot when Legacy of the Force had a “Legends” sticker slapped across its cover. Telling stories about IG-88 came with the same problems as filling in Boba Fett’s enigmatic past: anything that contradicted the Legends stories would make the fans angry, and anything that was pulled from Legends wouldn’t be as cool as whatever had been brewing in fans’ heads for the last few decades.
So instead of getting dragged online for ruining someone’s childhood by misrepresenting a droid with no lines, Filoni did to IG-88 what the makers of Shadow of the Empire and Knights of the Old Republic did to the Millennium Falcon: he kitbashed a couple of new pieces on and called the result something new. He explained in an interview with IGN back in 2019:
“So a droid like IG-88, if you know the Expanded Universe and the Star Wars history, there are a lot of stories around him or what might’ve happened to that particular droid. So out of respect for people that have been with this franchise a long time, it’s like, ‘Well, if we do something with this space, would that be contradicting those stories?’ So it’s better just to say, ‘Well, there’s other droids,’ it’s not like it was a unique assassin droid.”
Dave Filoni
And for the record, it totally worked. IG-11 was an instant hit with fans when he debuted in the pilot episode of The Mandalorian. He even managed to pull an emotional reaction when he temporarily exploded at the end of the first season, which isn’t unimpressive considering how he’s objectively a bunch of scrap metal pieced together. Maybe that’s the biggest difference between IG-88 and IG-11 — you don’t flash back and cry a bunch when you blow up your IG-88 action figure with a firecracker.
