"When I first got that job, I didn't know what I was going to do."

...neither did George.

I can attest, I worked at lucasarts around that time. for a game we were making, we had made a light saber color generator that let the player pick their own personal color. George sent an email to us that said we had to nix that and that there were only red for bad, green or blue for good and purple for Mace Windu. we had to kill the whole system and remove it from the game. it was a bummer for us, but I guess it kept things consistent so that's ok.

I could have sworn that there were different colored lightsabers in semi-cannon material (all the extended universe stuff is licensed and authorized so I consider it semi-cannon) prior to the prequels. Dark Forces II for example, and the extended universe books (Mara Jade). By Knights of the Old Republic (which did indeed come after the prequels) multi colored lightsabers were a bit more common...

The explanation of the color is from the crystals that make up the lightsaber (Lea's is red so it isn't side alignment, then again her kid...), and during the official universe time frame the empire controlled the crystals more which limited the colors out there... but that is more of a retcon...

Still interesting to hear how and why we got a new color in the official universe.

*geek

Adding video to channels (Geek) - requested by ant.

"it just went off in your hand"

Didn't Raven's Jedi Knight games have yellow and purple light sabers all over the place? I wonder how they got away with that.

i think it may be that Lucas changed his mind about this a few times. Sometimes, during the making of a movie, he cared a lot and wanted everything to match. Other times, when he was not interested in the universe, he didn't care and anything goes. Also, it's very likely that the emails that people in the studio got from George were actually from a writer, marketer, etc...
The further you dig into the guts of Star Wars, the more you realize that Lucas made up much of it as he went and had no qualms about inconsistency if a scene he wanted caused it.

These are things that you can do when you're the boss.

My understanding of star wars lore is that Sith use red lightsabers because the grow artificial crystals for their lightsabers, which only grow red (or red hues). Jedi use crystals that grow naturally, and thus have a much larger variety of colors (with some being rarer than others). Their is no logical restriction that says a Sith MUST use a red crystal, or that Jedi MUST use blue or green. I'd imagine that by lore, you would have to say that purple crystals are just super rare and that Windu being such an influential Jedi managed to get one of the rare few.

When that movie came out I thought that they gave the only black jedi a "black light"-sabre. How cute and racial, I thought. I was surprised he didn't talk about it. Am I the only one in on the joke?