In all but two installments of the Star Wars saga, the sagely master Yoda has been manipulated by puppeteer Frank Oz. With the release of the full saga on Blu-Ray however, the inevitable modernization that we’ve seen in previous re-releases of the saga will turn the puppet Yoda used in The Phantom Menace into the CGI version that we saw in Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith.

You may have seen in a documentary called “The Chosen One” that George Lucas considered replacing puppet Master Yoda with a CGI duplicate in the original layout of The Phantom Menace. He eventually decided against it only to realize that the battle between Count Dooku and Yoda in Attack of the Clones would be impractical with a puppet.

The end result was a drastically different Yoda in Phantom Menace than there was in Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. Both Yoda’s look very different from the original, but an emerging video seems to confirm that with this Blu-Ray re-release will come a shiny CGI replacement for Yoda in The Phantom Menace. Check it out below. Thanks to Slashfilm for the heads up!

For those who don’t remember what Master Yoda looked like as a puppet, here’s a clip of him from The Phantom Menace

And here he is in one of the most famous scenes from The Empire Strikes Back.

Adding CGI to past films is something that George Lucas has proven that he is not afraid to do. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.

What do you think? Does replacing the puppet in The Phantom Menace make the film better? Does it benefit continuity to have a CGI Yoda for the prequels and a puppet for the originals? Will Lucas jump the shark and attempt to replace the puppet Yoda from the originals?

Let’s not even joke about that. Please.