50 Roles for 50 Actors: Dream casting the Star Wars saga

Dream casting the Star Wars saga: Tom Kane as Yoda

Sometimes, you stick with what works. Yoda’s voice is iconic to the point where most film fans will know if it’s off. The distinctive croak, the backward syntax…it’s become a part of the collective movie consciousness, and it’s best not to mess with it. We can’t cast Frank Oz, who provided the voice (and occasionally the puppeteer work) for Yoda in all six movies, but we can go with the next best thing.

Tom Kane provided the voice for Yoda in the Star Wars: The Clone Wars TV series, as well as in a whole attic’s worth of Star Wars videogames. Simply put, he’s got it down. Plenty of people have impersonated Yoda over the years, and I don’t mean in movies. I mean at a bar after a couple of beers, as a way to sound faux-wise when posing irritating hypothetical questions, and sometimes for no particular reason. It’s just a fun voice. Kane, however, has made a career out of it. He knows the voice inside and out.

As for who could handle puppet duties for Yoda, how about Brian Henson, son of famous puppeteer Jim Henson and an accomplished puppet-master in his own right? More realistically, a new Yoda would probably be a computer-generated animation, but it never hurts to have an analog option on retainer.

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