We first met Yoda in 1980's Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, and bid farewell to the ancient Jedi Master a few years later in Return of the Jedi. George Lucas' Star Wars prequels revealed more about the hero at the peak of his powers, but much of his background remains a mystery to us.
Whether that will ever be explored remains to be seen—there were once plans for Yoda: A Star Wars Story before Solo underperformed—but The Guardian has learned that early plans called for the iconic Jedi to be...blue?!
A screenplay, written by Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan, unearthed by the site reveals, "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 also shows a Yoda who is portrayed in a blue hue, while a novelisation released alongside the movie in 1980 also said he was "blue-skinned." 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 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."
Explaining why Yoda was blue in various tie-ins, he bluntly explained, "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."
More recent editions of The Empire Strikes Back's comic book adaptation have redrawn Yoda to bring him more in line with the version seen on screen. As for why he went from blue to green, we don't have an official explanation, but it's another example of how much ideas and characters change during that transition from concept art to screen.
We'd also say it's possible that a blue Yoda was a little too similar to the Force Ghost version of Obi-Wan Kenobi, who appeared in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.
Yoda had a brief cameo in The Acolyte, a short-lived Disney+ TV series set in the High Republic Era of the Star Wars franchise (he also mentored Luke Skywalker again in The Last Jedi). We've also met "Baby Yoda" in The Mandalorian, though it's been confirmed Grogu is not a clone of Yoda and is instead just a member of the same race.
How would you have felt about a blue-skinned Yoda? Let us know your thoughts in the usual place.