Providing you weren't watching chat show This Morning last week, Yoda's appearance in Star Wars: The Last Jedi will no doubt have come as a huge surprise. He appears to provide his old pupil Luke Skywalker with some advice about where the Jedi Order should go next and one of the most endearing things about his cameo was that he's brought to life via a puppet just like in The Empire Strikes Back.
That's a contrast to the Star Wars prequels which featured the use of CGI (we did get a puppet in The Phantom Menace but that looked terrible and was replaced by CGI when the special editions were released) and The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson explains his decision in an interview with Uproxx.
You went with The Empire Strikes Back version of Yoda, the ornery version.
That felt really important to me. And, actually, I cut some of that out and Frank Oz said to me I had to put it back. Because when I first pitched him the scene, it’s like the Yoda from Empire is back because that’s the one Luke had the emotional connection with. And that’s why we did the puppet and recreated the Empire puppet: Neal Scanlan and his team did a recreation of the Yoda puppet. It’s not only a puppet, it’s an exact replica of the Empire puppet. They found the original molds for it. They found the woman that painted the original eyes for Yoda. Then Frank came and worked with them for a few weeks to get the puppet right. He did a lot of testing and a lot of adjusting with the puppet creators. It was amazing to watch the process. The idea that the last time Luke saw Yoda was in Return of the Jedi and the notion of getting back to that version of Yoda to form the emotional connection with Luke – including a glimpse of the impishness, as part of their relationship. It made a lot of sense.
So, Johnson put more work into bringing Yoda back to life on the big screen that Lucas did in 1999! It's actually amazing to hear how much effort went into the fan-favourite character's cameo and even more amazing that it wasn't spoiled online beforehand (we didn't even hear any rumours indicating that the Jedi would appear). What did you think of this cameo? Let us know in the comments section.