‘Star Wars’ fans are debating the intricacies of lightsabers after deleted ‘Return of the Jedi’ scene opens a can of worms

There are some things that are just inevitable. Birds have to sing, bees have to buzz, and Star Wars fans have got to geek out over Lightsabers. One pack of fans on Reddit is currently dissecting a decades-old deleted scene from ROTJ showing Luke building his new green saber after having lost his father’s blue saber (and hand) during their duel in Cloud City in Empire Strikes Back.

The scene in question is a bit of a legend in and of itself. Though it had been storyboarded for the film, director George Lucas denied for years that he had ever filmed the sequence. However, in August of 2010, Lucas himself debuted the scene in its entirety at Star Wars Celebration V in Orlando. The scene shows Vader attempting to reach out to his son across the galaxy. It then shifts to a cave on Tatooine showing Luke putting the last touches on his saber and then igniting the blade.

And twelve years later, one user on Reddit noticed something interesting.

The scene shows Luke finishing the construction of the saber’s activation module, the offset boxlike switch that is used to ignite the blade. As he finishes a pair of lights flash, one green, the other red. Is that red, the traditional color of the lightsabers used by Sith lords, an indication of Luke’s dark side potential?

The responses were a crash course in everything you never knew about lightsabers and their canon. Many users pointed out that what was shown were merely indicator lights and didn’t have to do with the crystals that give the saber its color (those are actually housed in a different part of the assembly). Some brought up the fact that in the original script and novelization the saber was blue, just like Obi-Wan Kenobi’s and Anakin’s lightsaber (Luke’s second saber is the first canonical evidence that green sabers exist).

One user pointed out that Luke wasn’t even sure the saber would work in the novelization (canonically one must be a proficient Force user before one can assemble a saber — no matter what they say at Disneyworld).

In any case, the scene is only kinda/sorta canon. Lucas felt that having the new saber debut at the battle above the Sarlaac pit would be a bigger surprise for the fans so Luke’s workshop scene hit the cutting room floor for three decades or so.

Of course, with the expanded TV canon we may see Luke with a red lightsaber at some point in the future. Fans will have to wait and see.