# Did Marty McFly cause problems with "Star Wars?" **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [October 21, 2014, 11:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-marty-mcfly-cause-problems-with-star-wars/702015 "2014-10-21T11:57:29Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![RivkahChaya](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rivkahchaya/32/8919_2.png) [@RivkahChaya](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RivkahChaya)\ **Post date:** [October 23, 2014, 2:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-marty-mcfly-cause-problems-with-star-wars/702015/41 "2014-10-23T02:59:46Z")
> [@Lamia](#): > > To my (admittedly limited) knowledge, there is no law that would cover “theft” of a character name that was not protected by trademark. Even if I’m wrong about that, since “vader” is Dutch for “father” and very similar to the German “vater”, I think it would be pretty difficult to make a compelling argument that one of the Georges _must_ have stolen the name from the other. There’s also a town in Washington State called Vader. That’s why it’s going to have to be some name like “Sdaarbt Ffoedyr,” that someone writing in English would not come up with, and not a name that sounds like it could be English, even if no one actually has that name, like “Beru Skywalker.” Calling a planet “Vulcan” doesn’t take much imagination. Being the second person to call one “Kashyyyk” suggests that someone got a peek at an unpublished or unproduced work. It’s really not the name itself: it’s that the use of it is proof of a larger violation. ---
**Author:** ![cochrane](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cochrane/32/10441_2.png) [@cochrane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cochrane)\ **Post date:** [October 23, 2014, 4:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-marty-mcfly-cause-problems-with-star-wars/702015/42 "2014-10-23T04:31:54Z")
> [@Ranger\_Jeff](#): > > I thought “Vulcan” was the name of a planet between Jupiter and Mars that broke up and became the asteroid belt. 😕 No, Vulcan’s hypothetical orbit was proposed to be between the Sun and Mercury. > **[Vulcan (hypothetical planet)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcan_(hypothetical_planet))** > > Vulcan /ˈvʌlkən/ was a proposed planet that some pre-20th century astronomers thought existed in an orbit between Mercury and the Sun. Speculation about, and even purported observations of, intermercurial bodies or planets date back to the beginning of the 17th century. The case for their probable existence was bolstered by the support of the French mathematician Urbain Le Verrier, who had predicted the existence of Neptune using disturbances in the orbit of Uranus. By 1859 he had confirmed un Ma... ---
**Author:** ![Andy\_L](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c67d28/32.png) [@Andy\_L](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Andy_L)\ **Post date:** [October 23, 2014, 12:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-marty-mcfly-cause-problems-with-star-wars/702015/43 "2014-10-23T12:40:42Z")
> [@Ranger\_Jeff](#): > > I thought “Vulcan” was the name of a planet between Jupiter and Mars that broke up and became the asteroid belt. 😕 Apparently the hypothetical planet between Mars and Jupiter was referred to as Phaeton [Phaeton (hypothetical planet) - Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaeton_%28hypothetical_planet%29) ---
**Author:** ![Lamia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/8e7dd6/32.png) [@Lamia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lamia)\ **Post date:** [October 24, 2014, 1:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-marty-mcfly-cause-problems-with-star-wars/702015/44 "2014-10-24T01:54:34Z")
> [@RivkahChaya](#): > > There’s also a town in Washington State called Vader. That’s why it’s going to have to be some name like “Sdaarbt Ffoedyr,” that someone writing in English would not come up with, and not a name that sounds like it could be English, even if no one actually has that name, like “Beru Skywalker.” Calling a planet “Vulcan” doesn’t take much imagination. Being the second person to call one “Kashyyyk” suggests that someone got a peek at an unpublished or unproduced work. > > It’s really not the name itself: it’s that the use of it is proof of a larger violation. I really do not think this is true, but if you have a cite that the use of an unusual name that is not protected by trademark in two different creative works is proof that one of the authors violated intellectual property law then I’d be curious to see it. If the two works were substantially similar then the use of the same name might be taken as _evidence_ of wrongdoing, but the name is the only detail from _Star Wars_ that Marty shared with young George. Even if George uses the name in his fiction, a story based on his encounter with “Darth Vader” isn’t going to bear much resemblance to the _Star Wars_ movies. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-marty-mcfly-cause-problems-with-star-wars/702015.md?page=2)