Lots of shocking things came out of this week’s episode of The Acolyte, but for me, one stands above the rest. It’s the fact that our new favorite maybe-Sith, the Stranger, is wearing a bronze helmet, not a black helmet.
If you’re reading this, you’ve probably seen the episode already or at least one of the episodes with this creepy new villain so you have an idea of what he looks like. Well, after the episode, Hasbro released images of its replica version of the helmet and it’s bright bronze, which I found shocking. Watching the show, I thought it was black. Star Wars bad guys (Vader, Maul, Kylo, Palpatine) tend to like black.
The assumption here is one of two things. The most likely possibility is that, in the reality of the show, the helmet was bronze when it was new but has since been in so many battles that there’s significant damage, hence the discoloration. Another possibility is that the helmet is actually bronze on-set but, through lighting and movie magic, it just ends up looking black on screen. (We’ve actually reached out to Lucasfilm to try and clarify this and will update the post if or when we find out.)
Now, why is this interesting at all? Well because, as most Star Wars fans know, it’s happened before. In The Empire Strikes Back, Han Solo’s jacket on Hoth looks blue on screen. In fact, it looks so blue on screen that when Kenner made toys of Han from those scenes, the toys wore blue. So, for a generation, everyone assumed the jacket was blue. However, it was later revealed the actual on-set jacket was brown. Debates rage to this day of which jacket is the real one, the one that was on set or the one we think we see?
I’d been calling it a Sith gimp mask until I saw the photos of the Black Series helmet.