Star Wars creator George Lucas has finally explained the long-running mystery as to why Jedi Master Yoda speaks the way he does.
First appearing in the 1980 sequel Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, the green-skinned Jedi has a distinctive way of speaking, which, until now, has been left up to interpretation.
Appearing at the 2025 TCM Classic Film Festival for a special 45th-anniversary screening of The Empire Strikes Back, Lucas finally explained the reason behind Yoda’s unusual speech pattern (via Variety).
Asked by host and moderator Ben Mankiewicz why Yoda speaks backwards, Lucas said it was a way to get audiences to really pay attention to the character.
“Because if you speak regular English, people won’t listen that much,” he explained. “But if he had an accent, or it’s really hard to understand what he’s saying, they focus on what he’s saying.”
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“He was basically the philosopher of the movie. I had to figure out a way to get people to actually listen — especially 12-year-olds,” he added, finally solving the decades-old mystery.
Meanwhile, after being asked to choose which character from the sequel he preferred between Yoda and Billy Dee Williams’ Lando Calrissian, Lucas evaded the question, saying: “If you have 12 kids, which one do you like the most?”
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Elsewhere in the interview, the Star Wars creator opened up about how he mapped out the original trilogy, saying the script he wrote was too long, so he had to cut it into three.
“I write like a blueprint,” Lucas said. “It’s not got a lot of detail on it. And when I got the script [for Star Wars] done, there was 130 to 180 pages. So I cut it into three parts and said, ‘I’ll focus on the first one, because we’ll never get enough money to make the whole thing.'”
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and the entire Skywalker Saga are streaming on Disney+ and also available to buy on DVD, Blu-ray and 4K.
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Harriet is a freelance news writer specialising in TV and movies at Digital Spy.
A horror enthusiast, she joined Digital Spy after working on her own horror website, reviewing films and focusing largely on feminism in the genre.
In her spare time, Harriet paints and produces mixed-media art. She graduated from the University of Kingston with a BA in fine art, where she specialised in painting. She also has an MA in journalism from Birkbeck University.