Darth Vader, Chewbacca and Yoda are the first characters you think of when Star Wars is mentioned – but what if the little green man was suddenly a completely different colour?
Star Wars icon Yoda was never supposed to be green.
Archival sources and a new evidence from the special effects makeup artist who worked on the puppet suggests that the little green man was supposed to be a different colour entirely.
According to reports, Yoda was meant to be a “bluish” colour as the final Empire Strikes Back 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.”
Early concept art for the iconic Star Wars character show him blank without colour, light blue and even pink, while two prints from 1980 also show him blue and purple.
A Marvel Comics book, released two months after The Empire Strikes Back first premiered in cinemas, still showed him as a grey-blue colour with long white hair.
It is not known why filmmakers decided to change him to green and the answer will probably never be known as when questioned by The Guardian, Lucasfilm and Walt Disney did not provide an explanation and “many senior people involved in those early days are now dead”.
Star Wars makeup artist Stuart Freeborn, who worked on Yoda, Chewbacca and Jabba the Hutt, sadly died in 2013 aged 98 after an impressive career in movie SFX.
Special makeup and creature effects designer Nick Maley said that the decision to make him green had already been decided before he joined the Star Wars series back in 1979: “By the time I got to work on him, he was green.”
“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.”
“We sat around for five months [while producers] decided what Yoda would look like, and then left us like seven weeks to try and actually make the world’s first animatronic superstar work.”
“I assumed everybody kind of tended to think: ‘Oh, Martians are little green characters.’ Right? So, you know, the green alien is a classic in people’s minds. I never questioned the fact that he was green, I never asked any questions about it, but we actually put dyes into the foam latex so that we didn’t have to paint it too much. That was green.”
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