George Lucas says Yoda talks like that so "12-year-olds" will pay attention

Lucas fielded this query at the 2025 TCM Classic Film Festival, where Empire was getting an anniversary screening. His answer, basically, is that audiences, and especially children, are too dumb to understand Yoda’s deep wisdom if you just say it normal-style. (Concepts like “Do or do not, there is no try” clearly being graduate level philosophical concepts despite their concurrent presence on like 8 million bumper stickers.) “If you speak regular English, people won’t listen that much,” Lucas added, giving his justification for making Frank Oz speak almost exclusively in swamp koans. (New SW custodians Disney, meanwhile, also released a blooper reel of Oz recently that’s like 10 percent him cracking wise in-character as Yoda, and the rest just clearly being in pain from holding up the incredibly heavy silicone puppet they switched over to for the prequels.) “He was basically the philosopher of the movie,” Lucas said of Yoda, or, as he’s now known to modern Star Wars fans, “Decrepit Grogu.” “I had to figure out a way to get people to actually listen—especially 12-year-olds.”

And listen they did, imbibing deep wisdom about how size, it matters not, and luminous beings are we. (Lucas didn’t get into where the concept of that one Attack Of The Clones DVD commercial where the announcer yells “Yo da man!” plays into this wider ideological framework, presumably leaving that one as an exercise for the reader.)

[via Variety]