SPOILER ALERT: This article discusses the very ending of ‘Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker’, so if you haven’t seen it yet, turn back now or proceed with caution.
By the end of ‘The Rise of Skywalker’, Rey had come to own all of the lightsabers. But as is the tradition, at the end of Jedi training, one must create their own lightsaber, thus the explanation as to why she buried those belonging to Luke and Leia and is shown brandishing her own new one crafted from her trusty old bo staff, which is yellow in color. Both Luke and Leia’s were blue.
Some may not think too much of the yellow bade. Lightsabres come in all sorts of colors, from Darth Vader’s red to Mace Windu’s purple. But allow me, if you will, to offer one possible explanation for Rey’s yellow saber.
For ‘Star Wars’ toy collectors, there has been a bit of a mystery lingering since the late 1970s when the first ‘Star Wars’ toys were released. In ‘A New Hope’, both Luke and Obi-Wan wield blue sabers opposed to Vader’s red. Yet, the original toys included loads of yellow sabers.
The original Luke Skywalker action figure had a yellow telescoping blade that extended from within his arm. Kenobi and Vader had similar mechanisms, but their blades were in movie-accurate colors.
As you can also see, the first child-size lightsabre play weapon was also colored yellow, as was the lightsaber on the box of the 12″ Obi-Wan figure/doll.
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It has been “explained” that the photos provided to the designers at Kenner were lacking. In this case, apparently the pictures showing the lightsabres in action were in black and white. That’s just one explanation floating around out there. As is the case with a lot of vintage ‘Star Wars’ stuff, no one seems to know THE answer.
But even after that, the Luke Skywalker figure released in conjunction with ‘Empire Strikes Back’ also came with a yellow lightsaber, now as a separate handheld accessory, minus the telescoping feature.
Like I said, this is just an oddity within the collection that people have questioned, but there just doesn’t seem to be a real explanation beyond maybe Kenner just didn’t have the right references, and besides they were for kids and kids don’t really care about details like that.
Perhaps there is a greater reason why J.J. Abrams gave Rey a yellow lightsaber in ‘The Rise of Skywalker’. Screen Rant suggests that the yellow saber is simply to signify that Rey has established her own identity after spending three movies trying to figure out who she is.
But considering how much of the movie was spent explaining away “plot holes” and resolving unanswered questions from the past, I like my idea that this was a way to, in a sense, explain the existence of the yellow lightsabers among the toys from ‘A New Hope’.
What do you think?
