It’s always exciting to get new Star Wars news or lore, right? Well, usually. But maybe not when it makes us think about what the franchise would have looked like had Yoda and Grogu not been the wrinkly, green aliens we’ve come to know and love. And apparently that’s almost exactly what happened. Reviews of sources from the Star Wars archives, as well as a new conversation had with a special effects makeup artist who did work on original Yoda puppets, suggest it was a late-in-the-game decision that had Yoda, and by extension, Grogu, looking the way we’ve come to anticipate.
In the final version of the screenplay, Luke and R2-D2 have landed on Dagobah, where they are confronted by the small creature we’ve all come to know and love. The screenplay reads, “Mysteriously standing right in front of Luke is a strange, bluish creature, not more than two feet tall. The wizened little thing is dressed in rags.” So basically, if the producers had followed the screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back to the T, Yoda would have been blue—and that just feels wrong.
So How Did We Avoid Blue Yoda?
Writers Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan were responsible for the screenplay that would eventually become The Empire Strikes Back, with some very early concept art even showing a pink Yoda. And we know that the final product will usually always be different from what makes it to the big screen, whether that’s for time, budget, or technical reasons. But why was this particular detail changed?
Honestly? We don’t know. Any attempts at discovering the reason went unanswered by Lucasfilm, and with so many of the people who worked on the original films having passed away, it leaves few options to find out. But the vagueness leads to head scratching when we consider just how much content is floating around out there with blue, purple, or even colorless Yoda—like the early concept art sketches from the late 1970s. Two other works from the same year that The Empire Strikes Back hit theaters feature a purple or blue Yoda. It wasn’t until a few months after the film’s release that we got green-skinned Yoda in print. Nick Maley, a special makeup and effects designer on The Empire Strikes Back, said to the Guardian, “I have a memory of a particular drawing … I seem to remember him being green in that drawing, and that would be before we’d ever started trying to try to make him.” When it came to the waiting game of Yoda’s final look, he went on to say, “We sat around for five months to decide what Yoda would look like, and then left us like seven weeks to try and actually make the world’s first animatronic superstar work.”
What do you think? Would you have enjoyed a blue or purple Yoda as much as the green-skinned version? Let us know in the comments, and check out the ComicBook forum to see what other fans are saying.