A closer look
George Lucas originally planned to have a real monkey wearing a mask play Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back, complete with a tiny cane. Luckily, a crew member who had worked on 2001: A Space Odyssey pointed out that apes simply take off their masks and ruin the shot, leading them to hire Jim Henson to create a puppet instead. If nobody had spoken up, the greatest cinematic reveal of the most powerful Jedi master in the galaxy would have been ruined by a confused macaque flinging its own feces around the Dagobah set. It perfectly encapsulates the utter chaos of nineteen seventies filmmaking, where a billionaire director genuinely believed that giving a live primate a rubber mask was a logical solution to a multi-million-dollar special effects problem
