Star Wars Viewers Won’t Believe What Yoda Was Originally Going To Look Like

Star Wars remains one of the most iconic franchises in film, responsible for launching the careers of huge stars and maintaining its popularity across five separate decades for millions of fans across the world.

Amongst the now very large roster of characters, Yoda remains one of the most iconic and immediately recognisable characters in the pantheon, sitting alongside Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader at the top of that tree.

Whilst some of that reputation is down to his confusing and irregular speech pattern, the other main reason that he is so visually striking, with green skin and a diminutive size that sets him apart from other characters.

But new evidence has emerged and it seems that wasn't always going to be the case, and he might have been even more out there visually if the original designs for the character were adhered to.

As first reported by The Guardian, little Yoda was originally supposed to be blue, with archival sources and eyewitness testimony suggesting that the decision to change him to green came very late in the day.

Nick Maley is a special makeup and creature effects designer who worked on the Star Wars series, joining the project in 1979, and he claims that the decision to make him green had already been taken before he got there.

“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.”

Much of the confusion over the timeline comes thanks to different forms of media depicting the character in various colours. Early concept sketches from 1978 have the character as either pink, blue or entirely colourless, whilst two printed works from 1980 continue to feature the character as blue or purple, suggesting the decision may have been made very late.

Equally it's possible that the decision to make Yoda green in the film was made, but there was a delay before that creative choice filtered down to other Star Wars media.

Whatever the case may be in reality, it's fun to think of how characters may have turned out without additional iterating. As long as hairless Chewbacca was never a possibility then I'm happy, because imagining him without all of those luscious locks is a pretty horrifying prospect.