Would you ever doubt Jedi master Yoda? Of course not. But what about the man who created him? Let's take a look at the Yoda scene that scared George Lucas to death.
Category
🎥
Short filmTranscript
00:00Would you ever doubt Jedi Master Yoda? Of course not. But what about the man who created
00:05him? Let's take a look at the Yoda scene that scared George Lucas to death.
00:10Star Wars Attack of the Clones is possibly the most underrated Star Wars prequel film.
00:14While both Revenge of the Sith and The Phantom Menace have their defenders, Attack of the
00:18Clones was always the ugly duckling of the trilogy. It was maligned for supposedly doubling
00:23down on the bad dialogue, poor acting, and the political plots of the first film.
00:37But what people didn't appreciate at the time was the great decisions Attack of the
00:40Clones actually made. It gave us Hayden Christensen as Anakin, Obi-Wan's glorious mullet, phenomenal
00:46villains like Count Dooku and Jango Fett, and last but not least, it mostly got rid
00:51of Jar Jar. And while it did have a terrific political thriller subplot with Obi-Wan as
00:55a Jedi private eye, it was also filled with wonderful giddy fight scenes Star Wars fans
01:00had only pictured in their wildest dreams. One was the promise of seeing dozens of Jedi
01:04ignite their lightsabers simultaneously in battle. But another now-famous fight scene
01:09proved to be George Lucas' worst nightmare during production. The scene in question happens
01:14toward the end of the film after Obi-Wan and Anakin try to fight Count Dooku. They are
01:19defeated quite easily by the former Jedi, with Anakin even losing an arm in the process.
01:23With all hope lost, it is up to 800-year-old Master Yoda to save the day, and perform some
01:28awesome acrobatics while doing so. The moment Yoda ignites his lightsaber and jumps into
01:33Dooku is the moment where the old Jedi Master proves his incredible power in combat, and
01:38when this happened, fans from around the world lost their collective minds. The fact that
01:42Yoda's adversary was Sir Christopher Lee, one of the greatest cinema legends of all
01:46time, was just the icing on the cake.
01:55But although the end result may have had fans cheering, the path to creating this scene
01:59was paved with tons of anxiety and many sleepless nights for George Lucas and his team of visual
02:04effects wizards. Lucas said on the film's Blu-ray commentary track,
02:08I was scared to death of the sequence and how we were going to pull this off. This was
02:12the biggest risk in the whole movie. Could I make this realistic enough to make it believable
02:16or would it be this ludicrous joke? The way out of the ludicrous joke was neither
02:20easy nor quick. The original script had Yoda engage Dooku with a lightsaber the moment
02:26he entered the hangar. Members of the Industrial Light and Magic visual effects team, including
02:30visual effects supervisor John Knoll, convinced Lucas to extend the sequence, and most importantly,
02:37Lucas agreed to have a show of force power take place before the lightsaber duel. This
02:48change proved to be vital. We've already known Yoda is adept at using the force ever
02:53since he lifted up an entire spaceship in Empire Strikes Back. On top of that, other
02:58characters were constantly building up how wise and powerful Master Yoda is in the first
03:02two prequel films. But we haven't yet seen him use a lightsaber, so switching suddenly
03:07from a static character who has only been sitting on a chair for the last two movies
03:11to a jumping acrobatic swordsman would have felt quite jarring. Animation director Rob
03:16Coleman backed this idea up on the Blu-ray commentary, saying,
03:19We felt if we got into the fight too quickly, the audience would not be able to travel that
03:23distance from Yoda being an 800-year-old character to be able to go around with such speed and
03:28be nimble. To fix this, the ILM team came up with what they called the Wizards Battle,
03:33which they hoped would bridge the gap between the old and wise Jedi and the lightning-fast
03:37swordsman. This worked wonders, because while this film gave every Jedi in existence a lightsaber,
03:42we had yet to see a proper force duel before. Earlier in the film, Anakin describes Yoda
03:47as the most powerful Jedi alive, and this fight actually shows us why.
03:52But there was another challenge Lucas encountered, a logistical one. He had to make Yoda, who
03:57had only been a puppet up to this point, mobile enough to actually perform a choreographed
04:01fight scene. And in order to do this, some real cinematic wizardry was required, and
04:06we're talking about a lot more than when Kermit the Frog rode a bicycle. To accomplish
04:10this, they needed an entirely digital version of Yoda. So the effects wizards at ILM studied
04:16footage from Yoda's first appearance in Empire Strikes Back, and gave the digital version
04:20the same nuanced movements to simulate the puppet. According to the Blu-ray commentary,
04:25Lucas was convinced the sequence would work the moment he saw Yoda enter the stage.