When Revenge of the Sith was in development, George Lucas and the Lucasfilm art team experimented wildly with what General Grievous could look like. One of their early designs deviated so much from the Grievous we all know (and love to hate) that he was almost indistinguishable from his own IG‑100 MagnaGuard bodyguards.
Jackson Hayes of ComicBook.com recently shared key details of this behind‑the‑scenes process, writing, “Lucas knew that he wanted to add another villain…some of them looked like IG units,” before settling on the more skeletal, biomechanical form we saw on-screen. That early concept art wasn’t left on the drawing room floor. Many of the sketches evolved directly into the electrostaff-wielding MagnaGuard protectors that flanked Grievous on Utapau.
What makes the design process even more fascinating is that General Grievous isn’t a random character plucked from nowhere. The prequels' team had real lore to work with, including the villain’s appearance in the 2003 Clone Wars series.
Born Qymaen jai Sheelal, Grievous was a Kaleesh warlord. The Kaleesh were a warrior culture of fearsome humanoid-reptilians, and Qymaen became a legend during a brutal war with the technologically superior Yam’rii. After suffering life-threatening injuries in a shuttle explosion, widely presumed to be orchestrated by Count Dooku and the Sith, Grievous’s shattered body was rebuilt into the mostly mechanical frame for which he’s become famous.
The whole tale has shades of Darth Vader all over it.
All this to say, when Lucas and his concept artists initially designed bulky, mechanical visuals for Grievous, they were inadvertently erasing one of the things that makes him so interesting – the line where sentience and empathy end and machinery takes over.
That early look, nicknamed "General Grievous Lite" by fans, would have completely shifted how we perceive the now-famous Star Wars villain. Instead of a unique bio‑cyborg, he might have been lost in a sea of MagnaGuard clones.
Or, he could’ve been something else entirely.
Redditors on r/StarWarsCantina nerded out over the Magna-Guard-style art and other designs, both praising the artists’ ingenuity and lamenting the lost potential of different scrapped concepts. As one user noted, “George gave the art department basically no direction other than ‘he might be a droid or part‑droid’ so they really had an opportunity to let their imagination run wild.”
When Lucas and the team finally landed on their final Grevious design and shifted the mass-produced armor structure to the MagnaGuards, they delivered a one-of-a-kind villain and an instantly recognizable elite guard. The result is that Grievous stands alone as a terrifying cyborg general, while his guards look like heavily augmented extensions of him.
By moving from one design to another, Lucasfilm sharpened the prequel trilogy’s aesthetic. Grievous got leaner, meaner, and more personal. The MagnaGuards became scary not only because of their violence, but because they look like the blueprints for their boss. It’s a great reminder that in Star Wars, sometimes the coolest concepts are actually hiding just below the surface.
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