In 2025, Star Wars fans worldwide are celebrating one of the greatest sequels of all time—The Empire Strikes Back. At the 45th-anniversary screening event during the 16th annual TCM Classic Film Festival, none other than George Lucas, the Jedi Master himself, finally solved a mystery as old as the film: Why in the Hutt does Yoda talk that way?!
Yoda is one of the most recognizable figures in all of cinema, not just Star Wars, and just like the character himself, his iconic way of speaking has transcended the film series.
Lucas, 80, sat down with fans in an intimate fireside chat to discuss some of the most alluring things about1983's The Empire Strikes Back. The most substantial question-and-answer moment explains why Yoda talks backward in the movie.
"Because if you speak regular English, people won’t listen that much. But if he had an accent, or it’s really hard to understand what he’s saying, they focus on what he’s saying."
And it's that simple! During the conversation, Lucas extolled the mercurial greatness of voice-over artist Frank Oz who gave Yoda is strikingly familiar gruff and manner of speaking. And now, generational fans have disjointed aphorisms like "Use the Force, you must," Wars not make one great," and "The greatest teacher, failure is."
In 2021, Oz spoke to the UK's Guardian as a retrospective of his luminous career. Naturally, Yoda's unusual speech pattern came up. He noted the original script had "a bit of that odd syntax." While the demotic chit-chat was a surprise, it inspired the fabled puppeteer to think more quirky. As we know, he did.
“It’s funny you ask about [Yoda] because I was just looking at the original script of The Empire Strikes Back the other day and there was a bit of that odd syntax in it, but also it had Yoda speaking very colloquially. So I said to George [Lucas]: ‘Can I do the whole thing like this?’ And he said: ‘Sure!’ It just felt so right.”
It was right. Yoda is a remarkable character and probably one of the best fictional characters in cinematic history. Yet, he would be nothing without the wit of Lucas and the whimsy of Oz. A marvellous marriage of the mind created a backward-talking Jedi.
“He was basically the philosopher of the movie,” the filmmaker added. “I had to figure out a way to get people to actually listen — especially 12-year-olds.” One could say that something told him "Do or do not. There is no try."