Weed recalls working on the movie, and initially catching wind that the creature department still needed a suit actor for the massive yeti. 

“I volunteered right off the bat! […] I was one of the five or six people who had been consistently doing creature type work in the model shop. It just so happened that I got connected on this show as the construction supervisor and so I ended up going to the meetings and talking with the art department. When I saw the storyboards and found out what we were doing, I knew I really wanted to do this just because I’d been doing creature work for approximately 14 years.”

Having made so many creatures and suits in the past, Weed knew exactly what was required of an actor, as well as how heavy the suit was going to be. He still volunteered, but it was going to be a rough day’s work. He continued: 

“[B]eing the monster in the suit is the ultimate, but I knew it was going to be a really uncomfortable, really hot, and, in a way, a really horrible thing to put yourself through.”

The task then began to envision a wampa in its final form. In the original cut of “Empire Strikes Back,” audiences only saw pieces of it. This was going to be the first visible, canonical appearance of a wampa, and Weed had to figure out what kind of animal it was, how it moved, and what its dimensions were. Remaining true to what a viewer might expect, the wampa was a humanoid yeti. Weed says he drew the look and movement from old Ray Harryhausen-conceived creatures from fantasy favorites like “Clash of the Titans” (1981) and “Jason and the Argonauts” (1963).