George Lucas continues war on puppets by adding new, digital Yoda to The Phantom Menace

So all-consuming is George Lucas’ quest for perfection, he has already taken up the digital spackle and begun applying it to the Star Wars prequels, whose special effects—while obvious improvements on their predecessors' embarrassingly crude use of “actual things”—have recently begun to look dated in his eyes. And so it goes that the upcoming release of Star Wars in a new format that you don’t own yet will feature a freshly scrubbed The Phantom Menace, finally erasing the massive oversight that once allowed a puppet Yoda to mingle with its CGI superiors. As you can see in the comparison clips below, Yoda has now been replaced with a newer computer-generated version to better match his appearance in Episodes II and III, as well as Lucas’ restless, always-improving vision. Meanwhile, Yoda and all of his primitive, tactile contemporaries remain untouched in the original trilogy—for now—offering grim reminders of the puppet-filled past that perhaps Lucas will one day finally overcome. [via /Film]