This 'Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3' Cameo Was Not CGI

Marvel

May 20

After Yondu Udonta had sacrificed his own life to save Peter Quill at the end of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Star-Lord gave Udonta's favorite weapon to the former Ravager's first mate Kraglin Obfonter: the Yaka Arrow. The film's mid-credit scene showed Kraglin struggling to deliver the whistling noises needed to control the arrow, unintentionally even shooting Drax.

At the start of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, he still has not mastered this skill, first hitting Nebula in the chest and shortly after missing Adam Warlock, who attacked Knowhere to abduct Rocket. But when the High Evolutionary attacked the former head of a Celestial with his goons, Kraglin got his much-needed encouragement from an unexpected source: Amidst the fighting, Udonta suddenly appeared, telling him to control the Yaka Arrow with his heart, not his mind. He had said nearly the same thing to Quill during the battle against Ego in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.

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What follows purposefully mirrors the scene from the second movie, when Yondo, Rocket, and Groot walk through the Ravager's ship while the Yaka Arrow, controlled by Udonat's whistling, does its job leaving dead bodies dropping all around them. Only this time, the arrow takes care of the High Evolutionary's henchman.

It would have been easy for the special effect team to just use some existing footage of Michael Rooker for Yondo's cameo in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, as ILM has done to include the passed-away Carrie Fisher in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. And they also could have recreated the Centaurian completely digitally, but director James Gunn chose to bring back Rooker to reprise his role as the blue-skinned alien. The main reason might be that the actor has appeared in all of Gunn's movies, and the director probably didn't want to break this tradition. Following his character's death, Rooker had already provided Yondu's voice for the Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special animated segments.

We will probably never get the answer if Yondu's sudden appearance on Knowhere was just a vision of Kraglin or if the former Ravager returned as a kind of Force-Ghost to encourage his former first mate.

The MCU has already presented several versions of a kind of Afterlife in both Black Panther movies, as well as in Thor: Love and Thunder and also in Moon-Knight, and one of the most heart-warming scenes in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 includes the dying Rocket being reunited with his former friends in a near-death experience. So it is very well possible that Udonka's "essence" is still out there.

Supporting this theory is the fact that Kraglin was not present when Yondu told Peter how he controls the arrow in GotG Vol. 2, so he could not have remembered it. But it is of course possible that Quill had told him off-screen.

In an interview after the second film's release, Gunn stated that Yondu will stay dead in the third film, but he still found a meaningful way to include him in his last Guardians of the Galaxy movie.

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