>>9304559>>9304704There's a bit of a journey involved here, but basically the Neimoidians looked very different during preproduction. They were thin with elongated faces, and the idea was that the battle droids were meant to resemble them, and they were going to be CG like the droids. At some point George decided to just make them dudes in masks and changed their design. Now the droids no longer looked like them, but the idea of the droids looking like Neimoidians still filtered into the EU, though they modified it by saying that they resembled dead Neimoidians.
For AOTC George decided to revisit the idea and have the battle droids' creators appear, so for the Geonosians he had the team dig up the unused Neimoidian design and use that as a starting point.
