Star Wars

Star Wars: Return of the Jedi VFX Artist Reflects on Abandoned “Lightman” Creature

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As you know well enough by now, not everything makes the final cut of a film. Deleted scenes are typically included on home media releases for fans to watch over, providing a little incentive to watch the movie outside of theaters. Other things don’t even make it to the level of a deleted scene, like Return of the Jedi‘s Lightman. A Video started to circulate on Twitter Tuesday of the fabled creature, which looked to be an actor dressed in a black suit outfitted with light bulbs everywhere.

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The video eventually came across the desk of visual effects maestro Phil Tippett, VFX supervisor on the original Star Wars trilogy. According to Tippett, people couldn’t stop laughing at the “alien.”

“Looked just like that. Everyone laughed. Never got shot,” Tippett tweeted in response to a fan.

While “Lightman” ended up being too bright and bizarre to be filmed, other things are being removed for being too dark. Case in point, a scene in The Rise of Skywalker was removed because Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) tortured Chewbacca (Joonas Suotamo) aboard his ship.

“Joonas describes torture scene that was filmed as very intense & very tough for him both as Chewie’s actor & also mentally because Adam had ‘psyched himself to be a real monster through it all, w/ the cameras on or off,’” @AdamDriverCentl detailed after reading Suotamo’s memoir. “Adam didn’t talk at all during breaks, even though at this point the actors were otherwise friends. Joonas says Adam was so convincing in the deleted torture scene that he was at times actually scared & he believes the scene might have turned out too dark for the film.”

The account added, “”Perhaps the transformation of Kylo Ren into Ben Solo would also have suffered with such an inhumane act that some viewers would see it as unforgivable even though he ended up saving the entire galaxy.’”

Return of the Jedi—and virtually all other Star Wars content—is now available to stream on Disney+. If you haven’t signed up for Disney+ yet, you can try it out here.

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