For many, of course, this is not new. Gunn once said in a now-deleted Tweet from 2018 that Baby Groot, as he appeared in “Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2” was not a resurrected Groot, but should be viewed as Groot’s son. The issue was likely confused because both characters had the same name, were played by the same actor, still only spoke one line of dialogue (“I am Groot”), and had pretty much the same personality. Baby Groot was a new character, but not in any way that one might notice.
On the “Vol. 3” commentary, Gunn reiterated:
“Here we see Groot reconstituting himself. He’s growing back throughout the movie. Groot, of course, is now Young-Adult Groot. Sometimes we call him ‘Swole Groot.’ He is Baby Groot, uh, in a youthful adult state. And I think we start to see here really that this Groot is not the same Groot from the first movie. Many people believe that the first Groot was just reborn in this new shape. Um, that is not the case. This is a totally different Groot than the first Groot.”
Totally different.
Gunn then implied that he had written a complicated backstory for Groot, and had solid storytelling reasons for replacing Groot with an exact duplicate. In Marvel comics, Groot first appeared in 1960, although the version from Gunn’s film was extrapolated from a 2006 reinvention of the character.
