The force be with hue: blue, Yoda originally was, comics reveal

“You must unlearn what you have learned,” Yoda instructed his stubborn apprentice, Luke Skywalker. And now Star Wars fans may have to do the same after confirmation that the beloved Jedi master was very nearly blue, or even purple.

- Oliver Holmes

Reviews of archival sources - and new testimony from a special effects makeup artist who worked on the first Yoda puppets - suggest filmmakers 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 jungle 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, raising questions about why that detail was altered.

The 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.