Where Did Lucasfilm Go Wrong With Jar Jar Binks?
Image Source: Wallpaper Cave
While the debate as to whether the Star Wars prequels were good or bad will perhaps never end, the entire Star Wars fanbase remains united in its hatred for Jar Jar Binks. Jar Jar Binks was intended to provide comic relief to the politically involved and otherwise serious plot of The Phantom Menace. So how did things go awry, and what made Jar Jar one of the most reviled characters in the Star Wars universe?
Jar Jar Binks was first introduced as he was rescued by Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi in The Phantom Menace (1999). The Gungan ended up accompanying the two Jedi and Queen Amidala to Tatooine and back, keeping the audience exasperated by his clumsy, clown-like antics. Jar Jar, quite inexplicably, gained Queen Amidala’s trust and rose through the ranks to Junior Representative for Naboo in the Galactic Senate. However, this turned out to be a huge mistake, as he was easily manipulated by Senator Palpatine to appeal for granting the Sith Lord emergency powers in the Senate. This led to the creation of the Grand Army of the Republic and kicked off the Clone Wars and the subsequent downfall of the Republic, along with that of the Jedi Order.
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Now, one often wonders why the intelligent Jedi and the clever queen relied so much on a creature whose mere presence meant trouble. For most fans of the franchise, this just doesn’t add up. There seems to be a misalignment in terms of how the character of Jar Jar Binks has been fleshed out and the missions he undertook through the events of the prequels and the Clone Wars. The extent of the confusion is such that fans had to come up with the theory of Jar Jar Binks being a Sith Lord to explain it all! It almost felt like Lucasfilm took its adult audience for fools.
Image Source: Wallpaper Cave
In addition to being generally annoying and speaking in a difficult-to-comprehend manner, Jar Jar Binks received the most flak for the character’s racial overtones. In a super-critical critique of The Phantom Menace, Joe Morgenstern famously called out the racial stereotypes projected by Jar Jar Binks in The Wall Street Journal by summing the character up as “A Rastafarian Stepin Fetchit on platform hoofs, crossed annoyingly with Butterfly McQueen.” As Jar Jar Binks was criticized to have been derived from blackface minstrelsy, much criticism was also rooted in the character’s Caribbean accent that, according to George Lucas, was based on “pidgin English from the Samoan islands and Pacific islands and Caribbean.”
George Lucas has maintained that in creating Jar Jar Binks, he was aiming at appeasing the younger audience and that the character is free of any racial stereotypes. In defending Jar Jar, he had told the BBC "How in the world you could take an orange amphibian and say that he's a Jamaican? It's completely absurd. Believe me, Jar Jar was not drawn from a Jamaican, from any stretch of the imagination." Twenty years later, Lucas maintained the Goofy-inspired Gungan remains his favorite character in the franchise.
So, why did Lucasfilm not drop the character entirely, like they dropped the concept of midi-chlorians after it received severe backlash? Perhaps because the kids did like the character and related to him. It is important to remember that Lucas depended heavily on the sales of Star Wars merchandise (mainly toys) to fund the prequels. It was therefore vital for him to make a movie that could pique the interest of the younger audience. However, in trying to create a new fanbase, the prequels ended up upsetting the older fans of the original trilogy.
As we are now being treated to more Star Wars media serving to explain the events set between the prequels and the original trilogy, one wonders if Jar Jar Binks could make a comeback. Hopefully, this time the issues with the character will be appropriately dealt with.
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Source (s): Reddit, The Wall Street Journal, Entertainment Weekly, BBC [1], [2], Wired, Wookieepedia