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Star Wars Prequels

Yoda Bloopers Released - and George Lucas Reveals Why Yoda Talks Backwards (cnn.com) 39

Posted by EditorDavid from the do-or-do-not-do dept.
80-year-old George Lucas appeared this week at a 45th anniversary screening of The Empire Strikes Back, reports CNN — and finally gave a good explanation for why Yoda speaks the way he does. "He explained that it came about in order to ensure that the little alien's usually profound messages really landed with audiences." "Because if you speak regular English, people won't listen that much," Lucas said at the 2025 TCM Classic Film Festival, per Variety . "But if he had an accent, or it's really hard to understand what he's saying, they focus on what he's saying." Yoda was "basically the philosopher of the movie," the filmmaker added. "I had to figure out a way to get people to actually listen — especially 12-year-olds."

Also this week, the verified Instagram accounts for Disney+, Star Wars and LucasFilm — Lucas' film and television production company — posted clips of Yoda doing bloopers on the set of "Star Wars" films, with [Frank] Oz continuing to do the voice and manipulate the heavy Yoda puppet even on takes that were unusable. Suffice it to say: One for the ages, Yoda is.
Lucas also remembered how he'd "mounted a guerilla campaign to generate excitement" for the first Star Wars movie, reports Variety. ("I got the kids walking around Disneyland and the Comic Cons and all that kind of stuff... that's why Fox was so shocked when the first day the lines were all around the block.") And Variety says Lucas described a condition in his contract for Star Wars "that would again be life-changing, both for him and the entertainment industry as a whole." "I said, 'besides that, I'd like licensing.' They went, 'What's licensing?'" Unimpressed by the film, and colored by the history of movie merchandising to that point, the studio capitulated to his demands. "They talked to themselves, and they went, 'He's never going to be able to do that. It takes them a billion dollars and a year to make a toy or make anything. There's no money in that at all.'"

Yoda Bloopers Released - and George Lucas Reveals Why Yoda Talks Backwards More | Reply

Yoda Bloopers Released - and George Lucas Reveals Why Yoda Talks Backwards

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  • So Lucas doesn't really explain why Yoda talks like that, just why he made Yoda talk like that. To get people's attention.

    Unless Yoda himself decided to talk funny so people would pay more attention. Is he on to something there?
    The current SG of NATO, mr. Rutte, is an example of that, I think. He speaks English fluently but with that grating Dutch accent. Which is something than can be fixed with relatively little training. Rutte is someone who literally spent most of his adult life training as a deb

    • "But if he had an accent, or it's really hard to understand what he's saying, they focus on what he's saying."

      Elle be beck!

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by JockTroll ( 996521 )
      Yoda is a fictional character. It speaks like this because its creatore decided to. It's effective, because it goes in the tradition of the foreign (often Oriental) wise master instructing the unlearned and uncultured Westerner. In-universe you can infer that his original language simply constructs sentences that way. He speaks a lot like a Sardinian native, though.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by mrbester ( 200927 )

        And that would derive from Latin, where the active verb appears at the end of the sentence. People forget (or never knew) this, which is why the "Harold got shot in the eye" belief from the Bayeux Tapestry gained hold because "Haroldus" was above someone suffering from sudden ocular disability, whereas Harold himself was being shown cut down by a swordsman below the verb "est".

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by GuB-42 ( 2483988 )

      I agree that it is most likely deliberate.

      I have a friend who is French and living in the US as an actor / voice actor. More often than not, he is asked to keep his French accent, sometimes to the point of overacting. And it makes sense, they cast a French guy to play a French character with a French accent.

      For Mr Rutte, I believe it is the same idea, he is a Dutch politician and even as a secretary general of NATO, he still represents his country, and his accent is a way to insist on that part. He is not A

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rossdee ( 243626 )

        Are you sure he isn't secretary general of OTAN ?

      • Similar experience here, a friend of mine who is a native French speaker has studied English for years and while in the US she can easily imitate a NY accent. However she found out that she managed to have better deals (she works in the fashion business) if she used received pronunciation with a strong French accent, which makes her sound like Inspector Clouseau on heels. I can't blame her American peers because she sounds positively endearing this way. She also took to dress like something out of "Emily in

    • He speaks English fluently but with that grating Dutch accent. Which is something than can be fixed with relatively little training.

      Out of curiosity, what is the "correct" accent with which to speak English?

      • Obviously, it is dependent on the location in which you are speaking.
        If you are speaking English in France, it should be done in a French accent.
        When I visited New York, my midwestern accent changes quite naturally at this point.
        Do they not teach this school anymore?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Zak3056 ( 69287 )

        He speaks English fluently but with that grating Dutch accent. Which is something than can be fixed with relatively little training.

        Out of curiosity, what is the "correct" accent with which to speak English?

        Received Pronunciation?

  • Now that was actually really funny. I wish they wouldâ(TM)ve released that kind of stuff way earlier.

  • If the new Yoda puppet was so heavy that it couldn't be used for more than two minutes straight... why did they never build a support rig for it to carry most of the weight?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by GuB-42 ( 2483988 )

      Maybe they didn't need a scene that is more than 2 minutes long, and that the actor getting a sore arm from time to time and the occasional blooper didn't justify the added complexity, cost, and loss of flexibility a support rig could result in.

  • ... speak in that almost unintelligible accent just to coax people into listening more carefully? I cannot confirm this to have worked on me or anyone else...

    • Lucas has taken more credit over the years than he deserves and in many ways became the hack that he railed against in his youth. Star Wars was more of a collaboration than he will admit to. His wife edited it and she was an Oscar winning editor who divorced him so naturally he had to come out with his cut decades later (leaving most of it alone likely because the clippings were gone) and nearly every change he could make degraded the film slightly. Tech likely helped greatly when he had complete control an

  • Japanese style? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by computer_tot ( 5285731 ) on Sunday April 27, 2025 @12:52PM (#65334869)
    I always thought Yoda was speaking in a Japanese style rather than "backwards". The Jedi were inspired (in part) by samurai and I assumed Yoda was representative of a wise, old samurai who had forsaken his warrior ways to live a peaceful life in exile.

    As I recall, Japanese tends to place the verb at the end of a sentence, which is semi-backward from English. So instead of "I went to the store" the Japanese equivalent would be "To the store I went." (Or maybe "I, to the store, went.") Which seems to match Yoda's pattern of speech.
    • You may be right, but I don't know enough about the Japanese language to have an opinion. I do know that to me it sounds as though Yoda spoke using English words and German syntax.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      "Backwards" usually just means a reverse of Subject-Verb-Object sentence construction - like "Jack ate a hot dog" - subject Jack (who did the eating), verb eat (what he did), and object hot dog (what he ate).

      You can vary it, some languages can be Object-Subject-Verb - like Yoda "hot dog Jack ate"

      Some languages are even meaner and do Object-Verb-Subject

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      You are right about Japanese sentence order, although it's typically not as wordy as Yoda is.

      I figured that Lucas just did it to make him sound profound, which was mocked by the movie Mystery Men. In reality Yoda didn't say much in the original movies, and most of what he did say was either obvious bollocks or terrible advice. The prequels only confirmed that, with Yoda basically handing a vulnerable Anakin to the Emperor by telling him to bury his quite legitimate feelings.

  • Reason simple is (Score:3)

    by Chris Mattern ( 191822 ) on Sunday April 27, 2025 @03:24PM (#65335213)

    Yoda former FORTH programmer was!

  • Fuck Instagram. Anyone got a link to a version of the video you can control (rewind, fast-forward, etc)?

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