The Unbridled and Mildly Horrifying Evolution of CGI Luke Skywalker

If you read the rest of this story, a fleeting product of my labor on this spinning hellscape, I want you to promise me something. When I die, do not resurrect me via CGI. Do not reproduce the monotonous sound of my voice via a voice synthesizer. Do not hire and digitally alter a body double that vaguely looks like me. Please. Let me be dead.

Why am I contemplating the threat of digital afterlife, you're surely (not) asking yourself? Well, in Episode 6 of The Book of Boba Fett, I couldn't help but notice that Star Wars once again took a shot glass, dipped it in the Fountain of Youth, and downed it all. After recreating young Luke Skywalker in The Mandalorian Season Two finale—with a questionably zombified face that's still roasted online to this day—the computers have done it again! But better. I think.

In this week's installment, we see CGI Young Luke train Grogu in the ways of the Jedi, rudely questioning the little green baby's commitment to the bit the whole way through. Anyway. You might be asking some questions. Is Mark Hamill involved? Why does Young Luke's mouth move like that of a South Park character? Why did CGI Young Luke 1.0 give you nightmares for three straight weeks, while 2.0 only kept you up one night? I asked these questions too, and unfortunately found some answers.

All right. So we don't yet know the specifics of Skywalker's digital resurrection in The Book of Boba Fett. All we know is that the episode credits an actor named Scott Lang as Skywalker's stunt double, and Graham Hamilton as the performance artist. I'm not sure what any of this means. But I do know how computers built the scarier Luke we saw in The Mandalorian. Richard Bluff, a supervisor for Industrial Light & Magic VFX, told IndieWire how his company pulled it off. Essentially, they brought Mark Hamill to the set so he could actually, you know, perform. Apparently, a 30-year-old-looking body double was brought in, too. Then, the Hamill and the body double were effectively put in a visual effects program (called Lola) and blended together until on screen we had a de-aged human smoothie.

“They effectively reproduced a de-aged version of Mark for the shots by combining the texture from his face and also [the body double's] younger face," Bluff said. "The biggest challenge for this sequence was that we weren’t de-aging Mark in every single shot, and we had a variety of performances that Lola had to work on, too.”

The result? Nightmare fuel. The resulting PlayStation 2 cutscene character was so yikes that a YouTube deepfaker, Shamook, fixed The Mandalorian footage to such passable heights that LucasFilm hired him. Now, if all of this makes you want to make an amendment to your last will and testament, wait until you hear about Luke's voice. Hamill didn't record lines for The Mandalorian, according to Jon Favreau. In Disney Gallery: Star Wars: The Mandalorian, he revealed, "Something people didn't realize is that his voice isn't real. His voice, the young Luke Skywalker voice, is completely synthesized using an application called Respeecher."

Read this horrifying description of Respeecher from a sound editor who worked on the series, Matthew Wood: "It's a neural network you feed information into and it learns," Wood says. "So I had archival material from Mark in that era. We had clean recorded ADR from the original films, a book on tape he'd done from those eras, and then also Star Wars radio plays he had done back in that time. I was able to get clean recordings of that, feed it into the system, and they were able to slice it up and feed their neural network to learn this data."

Ah, yes! Slicing the sound of a human voice and feeding it into the salivating mouth of a neural network! So it can learn this data! Dear god. Putting cursed piece by cursed piece together, we can only assume that The Book of Boba Fett constructed its Luke Skywalker via a new and improved swirl of Scott Lang, the performance artist, and Respeecher. His mouth still moves kinda funny, but we were only mildly distracted by it this time. Kudos to Uncanny Valley, I think. And prepare yourself for any and every character in Star Wars history to stay preserved in carbonite, Lucasfilm bashing them together like kids with their action figures.

Again, please, reader, if you got this far? Leave me dead.

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