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“You must unlearn what you have learned,” Jedi master Yoda instructed his stubborn apprentice, Luke Skywalker. And now Star Wars fans may have to do the same after confirmation that the beloved fictional alien was very nearly blue, or even purple.
Reviews of archival sources – and new testimony from a special effects makeup artist who worked on the first Yoda puppets – suggest film-makers made a decision late in the development process to switch the character’s skin colour to green.
Had producers of The Empire Strikes Back closely followed the final screenplay, then Yoda would have been “bluish”.
In the text, Luke and his droid companion, R2-D2, are surprised after being confronted by a small creature who appears on the swamp-covered planet of Dagobah. “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,” reads the screenplay.
Derived from George Lucas’s original story, the screenplay for the second film in the original Star Wars trilogy was written by Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan. While final movies always differ slightly from the screenplay, most other elements from the text were kept in the feature film, raising questions about why that detail was changed.
Yoda’s eventual colour change is not unknown among fans. Early concept art sketches from around 1978 show Yoda in different hues, sometimes colourless and other times light blue or pink.
However, two other printed works from 1980, the same year the film was released, continue to describe or portray a blue or purple Yoda, indicating a late-stage switch.
The first document, a novelisation released as the movie was out in cinemas, describes him as “blue-skinned”. One version of that book was even published in July 1980, two months after the film had already premiered with a green Yoda.
A second, more visual example of a non-green Yoda, comes from comic book versions of The Empire Strikes Back. Several scenes portray him as purple, and also much smaller and elf-like than in the feature film, with long white hair. The book, a collected version of the Marvel Comics adaptation of the film, depicts most scenes as they appeared on screen, suggesting the decision to change Yoda’s colour was made after most other character and set decisions were agreed.
It is not clear why Yoda was changed to green. Attempts to seek comment from Lucasfilm and its parent company, the Walt Disney Company, went unanswered.
Many senior people involved in those early days are now dead, including the comic book writer Archie Goodwin and artist Al Williamson. Stuart Freeborn, the British pioneering movie makeup artist behind the creation of Yoda – as well as the 7ft-tall Wookiee Chewbacca and the slug-like Jabba the Hutt – died aged 98 in 2013.
Freeborn is alleged to have mirrored Yoda’s face on his own, and Yoda’s looks were also said to be partly inspired by Albert Einstein.
Nick Maley, a special makeup and creature effects designer who worked on the Star Wars series, said he was not sure exactly who decided to make Yoda’s character green, but that the decision had already been made before he joined the project in 1979.
“By the time I got to work on him, he was green,” said Maley, who is sometimes referred to as “That Yoda Guy” because of his work on Yoda’s skin. “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.”
Maley did, however, note there was a rushed period in the summer of 1979 when Yoda’s look was finalised at Elstree Studios in the UK. “We sat around for five months,” he said, while producers tried “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.”
Asked about the colour change in the 1980s comics, he said that tie-in books were often made independently of film production, and may have used outdated source material, such as superseded concept art. “All sorts of crap goes on based on misunderstandings through the course of having a large organisation of different people doing different things along the way,” he said.
Still, he added that green might have been the obvious choice.
“I mean, 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,” he said. “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.”
Yoda’s character is one of the most mysterious of the many hundreds of aliens in the Star Wars franchise, with his home planet never revealed. Little is known about the species, which is also unnamed, other than they live for many centuries, have strong “force” powers and are always depicted with green skin.
There was renewed interest in Yoda and his kind after the release of the Disney+ series The Mandalorian, where an infant member of the species called Grogu plays a leading role. That character is colloquially referred to as Baby Yoda, although they are not known to be relatives.
