Blue Yoda? STAR WARS’ iconic Jedi Master once looked very different in THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK
We first discovered Yoda in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Backand bid farewell to the former Jedi Master a few years later, in 1983. Return of the Jedi. That of Georges Lucas Star Wars the prequels revealed more about the hero at the height of his powers, but much of his past remains a mystery to us.
Whether this will ever be explored remains to be seen: there were once plans to Yoda: A Star Wars Story Before Solo underperformed, but The Guardian (via SFFGazette.com) shared an article revealing that early plans called for the iconic Jedi to be… blue?!
A script, written by Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan, unearthed by the site reveals: “Mysteriously, right in front of Luke stands a strange bluish creature, no more than two feet tall. The little withered thing is dressed in rags.”
Early concept art also shows a Yoda depicted in a blue hue, while a novelization released alongside the film in 1980 also said he had “blue skin”. The original comic book adaptation of The Empire Strikes Back also featured a blue, sometimes purplish Yoda.
The site tracked down Nick Maley, a special makeup and creature effects designer who worked on the Star Wars series, and he revealed, “By the time I started working on him, he was green. I remember one particular drawing. I seem to remember him being green in that drawing, and that was before we started trying to do it.”
Explaining why Yoda was blue in various links, he bluntly explained: “All sorts of crap happens based on misunderstandings due to a large organization of different people doing different things along the way.”
More recent editions of The Empire Strikes BackThe comic book adaptation redesigned Yoda to make him more consistent with the version seen on screen. As for why it changed from blue to green, we don’t have an official explanation, but it’s another example of how ideas and characters change during this transition from concept art to screen.
We’d also say it’s possible that a blue Yoda would look a little too much like the Force Ghost version of Obi-Wan Kenobi, who appeared alongside Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back And Return of the Jedi.
Yoda made a brief appearance in The Acolytea short-lived Disney+ television series set in the era of the then-High Republic. Star Wars franchise (he also mentored Luke Skywalker again in 2015’s The Last Jedi). We also met “Baby Yoda” in The Mandalorianalthough it has been confirmed that Grogu is not a clone of Yoda but simply a member of the same race.
How would you have felt about a blue-skinned Yoda? Express your thoughts in the usual place.
