Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker built a 28,000-pound puppet it didn’t use

By this point, reports of what could have happened — or what was happening without us knowing it — in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker are nigh-legendary. This was a movie that went through a lot of revisions before in finally made it to the screen. A lot was left on the cutting room floor, or else pivoted away from entirely before the final version was stitched together.

Take, for example, the bit where Kylo Ren visits Mustafar to look for a Sith wayfinder. Originally, he was going to go to a swamp planet, where he would encounter a bizarre Lovecraftian creature known only as the Oracle. We know what that creature would have looked like thanks to the book The Art of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker:

You see the plushies we missed out on?

Now, again, the Oracle wasn’t featured in the final version of the movie, but according to the book, Lucasfilm did actually build a working version of the creature. “The Oracle is the biggest silicon pour we have ever done,” said Neal Scanlan, creature and droid effects creative supervisor, in the book. “The guys who did Bor Gullet for [Rogue One: A Star Wars Story] approached this one in a rather off-handed way. To their credit, they did it in one pour. It was nearly twenty-eight thousand pounds.”

If you’ve forgotten what Bor Gullet was, here’s a kind of disgusting reminder:

Anyway, back to the story: 28,000 pounds! That is 14 tons of puppet. That would have required nine puppeteers: two for the eyes, one for the head, and six for the legs. For comparison’s sake, the Jabba the Hutt puppet in Return of the Jedi weighed about 2,000 pounds and required three puppeteers.

And they didn’t even use the Oracle puppet! It makes you wonder how late in the game they decided to change course, because that sounds like a pretty big investment to just set aside. Hopefully Star Wars fans can see it in a museum or on a studio tour at some point.

And that’s not the only interesting tidbit coming from behind the scenes of The Rise of Skywalker. Recently, there are behind-the-scenes shots from a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it scene from the start of the movie featuring Rey sitting on the Sith Throne, a chilling vision of the future that could have been:

Okay, now do a silly one:

The Art of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker comes out March 31. The movie itself is available to watch on-demand now, since Disney dropped it a bit early so people currently in quarantine on account of the Coronavirus could enjoy it.

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h/t Polygon