20 Things You Didn't Know About Star Wars: Revenge Of The Sith
16. General Grievous Was Originally A Child
General Grievous made his cinematic debut in Revenge of the Sith, and the character's distinctive design was iterated upon heavily throughout production.
Lucas' only brief to the art department was simply to create a "droid general," and so an extremely early concept for Grievous went the left-field route of depicting him as a child.
More to the point, he was a child who sat on a floating chair and was guarded by two IG-88 droids.
Obviously Lucas didn't roll with this design in the end, his rationale being that audiences simply wouldn't believe a child as a legendarily fearsome master of hand-to-hand combat.
Believe it or not, Grievous' final design was actually inspired in part by, of all things, a bathroom detergent spray nozzle. Can you see it?