Usually, when I write about items from the Imperial Archives, I’ll focus on items that you will hopefully one day be able to see at The Saga Museum of Star Wars Memorabilia, but this time, I’m going to include a couple of important items that probably won’t ever go on public display there. I am including these items, because of the significance of Stuart Freeborn’s Yoda Archive.
I first learned about Stuart Freeborn when I was in elementary school, reading about the making of each Star Wars movie. His credits on Star Wars and Return of the Jedi—“makeup supervisor” and “makeup designer,” respectively—are fairly unassuming; only his title on The Empire Strikes Back—“makeup and special creature designer,” really offers a clue of the major role that he really played. Stuart was responsible for bringing to life truly fantastic characters including Chewbacca, Jabba the Hutt, the Ewoks, and most notably, Yoda.
Many years ago, as Stuart was nearing the end of his life, he wanted to make sure that key materials from his production archive would be saved for posterity, so he made arrangements to find people who would appreciate and preserve these items. Lisa and I were honored to become the home for Stuart’s Yoda archive.
This consisted of everything Stuart could find that related to the creation of Yoda, from piles of tiny screws used in the mechanisms inside the puppet’s head to random bits of plaster; from design sketches to screen-used pieces. Here are some of the highlights:
These are excerpts from a spiral bound notebook Stuart dedicated mostly to the creation of the Yoda puppet (though there are also a couple of notes on Chewbacca). The sketches show how the puppet head was designed in layers surrounding a space for the puppeteer’s hand.
These are plaster components that correspond to the layers shown in the sketch, as well as a fiberglass mold for the “plunger,” the main inner structure.
These are molds and pieces related to Yoda’s hands, nails, lips, and ears.
This is a set of Polaroids showing a mechanism for controlling Yoda’s eyes, accompanied by a variety of eyes and potential mechanisms for moving them.
These are parts of a “Yoda Stand-In,” a static figure that could be used to set up lighting and arrange camera shots without requiring a puppeteer to hold up the puppet. (The figure on the right is displayed in the original prop backpack that Luke uses to carry Yoda in during The Empire Strikes Back, which we acquired separately.)
In the first photo, the head on the far left is a preproduction prototype; the heads on the right are the only two Yoda puppet heads that appear on screen in The Empire Strikes Back. The heads were made from foam latex, which desiccates, shrinks, and eventually disintegrates over time; new heads were made for Return of the Jedi. The photo on the right shows a harder “biscuit foam” head, which may be the best surviving original three-dimensional representation of what Yoda actually looked like in 1980.
The bad news is that the condition of the original heads makes them unsuitable for museum display. The good news is that, between the molds and the biscuit-foam head, we have the most significant components from the Yoda Archive needed to construct the most realistic possible replica of the original Yoda puppet.
Propstore’s Brandon Allinger connected with Stuart Freeborn’s assistant Nick Maley, who molded the original latex parts for Yoda for both The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, to create this replica, which we do hope will one day be on display at The Saga Museum. (Museums regularly display replicas of fragile items in order to conserve the originals for posterity.)
This is a working puppet, complete with mechanisms to open and close the eyes and to move the eyes and ears, the same way they were done in the original films. The first time I saw the finished puppet, Nick was operating it, and it genuinely felt like Yoda was really alive, right there in front of me. As soon as he took his arm out of the puppet, the life was gone; it’s something you’d have to see to believe.
And I hope that one day you will.
If you’d like to learn more about Nick Maley, please visit http://nickmaley.com/.