adywan said:
As i have said before, there isn't a Yoda surprise. It was a surprise meant for Luke and not the audience. If it was meant to be a surprise then they wouldn't have used him in the promotional material prior to the films release.
I've seen fans that try to explain Yoda's crazy behaviour when we first see him as it being down to him living secluded so long on Dagobah. But this is completely wrong. He is only acting that way to fool Luke. It was more of a test to see if Luke was open minded enough to think that this little green goblin could be the greatest jedi master. he failed.
So there really isn't a problem with having Yoda in the prequels. No surprises spoilt.
I've got to respectfully disagree with this logic. The prequels were always touted as being about Anakin Skywalker's journey to becoming Darth Vader, to the extent that the Vader breathing accompanied Anakin at every damn opportunity in the trailers, and you only have to remember the poster of Jake Lloyd with Vader's shadow. It was made clear to the audience from day one that he's going to become Darth Vader - it doesn't mean that we SHOULD have known and you're quite rightly addressing this in your edit and working to preserve the reveal in ESB.
By that same logic, just because the audience knew what Yoda looked like from the promotional material released before the film, doesn't mean we SHOULD have known. In my opinion, it's quite obvious he was meant to fool us as well as Luke - I mean, I never saw this promotional material prior to the film and therefore I personally never knew it was Yoda until Luke did, so I think this needs to be preserved for those watching it with fresh eyes without prior spoilers. Had you not seen these spoilers yourself in 1980, it may have been a surprise for you as it was for me when I first saw it.
I still think we shouldn't SEE Yoda until ESB. We should either hear mention of him or we should only hear his voice along with a hologram that doesn't actually reflect his real appearance (which is also a nice homage to the Wizard of Oz which is exactly the kind of thing OT Lucas used to do)