Jar Jar Binks: The greatest thing that ever happened to Star Wars | Hacker News Reader

Jar Jar Binks: The greatest thing that ever happened to Star Wars

ilovejarjarbinks.tripod.com

16 pointsthrowup23824 comments

No one (other than Lucas) could ever convince me that Jar Jar wasn't always supposed to be the 'big bad' of the prequels, until one of George's backers told him they'd pull funding if he didn't make more 'marketable' villains

https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWars/comments/3qvj6w/theory_jar...

I've always liked this theory about Jar Jar, and it's fun to look at the little hints that his villainy might have been the original intent. But I suspect that the force (pun intended) that prevented such a thing was merchandising. George Lucas knows how to sell toys, and he likely foresaw the blowback if kids' beloved action figures, posters, etc. suddenly represented an evil character rather than a good one.

It seems like people have come full circle on the prequel movies, and now unironically enjoy them again after going through a phase of disliking them and then ironically liking them.

Maybe it was the new movies that made us realize how much worse they could have been.

IMHO, it's better to just accept that there are only two Star Wars films. Wonder about what may have happened after the Empire Struck Back, and be sad that we'll never know.

It's better than the alternate realities that many experience. ;)

I give Marcia Lucas so much credit. Always overshadowed by George but the first two films are great because of her influence. And her ability to control her husband.

Star Wars got self-indulgent after she left.

I think it goes deeper than that. Look at Lucas' filmography as director. THX, American Graffiti, ANH . . all with Marcia editing credits. And after that . . well, you'll be hard pressed to find any directing credits at all, until the Prequels, more than two decades later. So devil's due to old George: it's been 22 years since I looked at SAP BAPI, and if you sat me down in front of an IDE to program the stuff I would probably be even worse at it than Lucas was at directing movies in 1999. Granted, I know this, and I would not take a BAPI gig without thoroughly warning my would-be employer that I am going to suck at it.

There must have been a sort of magic there, something greater than the sum of its parts, but that's true for an awful lot of great films. There's always some great unexplainable They seem to happen by accident, by lucky intervention from a gifted cast, by a once-in-a-century musical agglomeration, by a herculean labor of love from everyone concerned, through the titanic efforts of singular madmen (who often become as much of a story as the one they are trying to film). The directors we remember are the ones most likely to appear with these miracles on a semi-regular basis. Maybe George and Marcia were one of those thermodynamic miracles, great unexplainables.

ROTJ is not bad in my book - not as good sure, but I like it.

I mean, some of it is good, but there's the Gonk Torture scene, and there's all the green screen work, which is just foreshadowing for the prequels which are like 90% sterile green screen.

I dunno, rogue One is actually my favorite now. I also really like the series that goes with. rotj I also loved but I was 4 when it came out and my favorite scene is like the first 20 minutes when they save han.

The new movies made no sense. At least the crappy prequels followed some sort of logic despite the bad execution. No one is gonna dig into the new trilogy for spin offs.

I don't hate the prequels.

But to me, Jar Jar is a singularly unlikable character.

People love the Star Wars they grew up with.

The resurgence of support you see for the prequels is just the kids who saw them at the age appropriate time are now grown up and posting to social media.

Unpopular opinion but I don’t think any of them are particularly good movies but as vehicles for toys and video games they captured the attention of every child

My own kids are growing up with Rebels, Asohka and Rey. The latter is getting a lot of hate right now but I’m sure in a couple decades the support will turn around

> People love the Star Wars they grew up with.

I call this the 'SNL effect', as everyone argues that the best cast was the one that happened to be on the air when they first discovered the show.

I don't know, my favorite is Farley and Sandler, Spade, Myers, Carvey, etc .. but the one with the ghost busters cast was probably the best there were a ton of comedy greats back then. I was in my 20s when will Ferrell hit and he and the cast since were never that rememberable, I think Tina fey is probably the acception, she's awesome in most things I've seen her.

I watched the Phantom Menace last night for the first time in like 15-20 years. It aged terribly. I didn't think about it as a kid, but watching it as an adult made it more apparent what those describing Jar Jar as a racist caricature were talking about. Also, I don't find "because the memes" a good reason to like a movie. I probably will never watch Ep 1 again - and considering I didn't even like Ep 2 as a kid, I'm not looking forward to that upcoming rewatch.

The prequels were awful and Jar Jar Binks was a horrible, no good character. That said, I had no idea tripod still existed! What a blast from the past.

> Jar Jar Binks was a horrible, no good character

Although I don't believe in the existence of more than two Star Wars films, George Lucas is not known for writing deep characters. You're not supposed to like Jar-Jar, he's the titular Phantom Menace, and of course he's horrible and no good. No wonder he's always trying to mess everything up and make it look like he's just clumsy. whoops I accidentally convinced the Intergalactic Senate to invest unrestricted emergency powers in my evil friend. Oh darn.

What's with the file download when opening the site?

This site needs to be removed from Hacker News.

Counterpoint: this is vintage internet and needs to be preserved and shared

I haven’t seen a tripod/lycos site in the wild in well over a decade

in the 'good ol days', sites used to have these little background music files stored as MIDI files, which would autoplay as soon as you entered the site

like all good things, people with nothing to live for but money started abusing them...

Does that mean we've isolated who the protagonist of TPM is? Because I'm still not a hundred percent sure of that.

I've now met so many prequel lovers - some of them people I deeply respect - that I can't chalk it up to dumb, or faulty aesthetics, or hype bandwagoning. I genuinely think there's been a generational shift[0] in how people experience the medium of film. It's a shift that the prequels themselves are no small part of. Blocking, eyelines, camera placement, diegetic/nondiegetic, continuity - these just aren't part of a visual grammar for many among the young and growing part of the population. Although the prequels do make a lot of (really bad) mistakes from a screenplay perspective, you can potentially recover from those with something as simple as camera placement. But the kids don't really care - it's not how the medium speaks to them.

The newer Star Wars films[1], while at least cognizant of the film discipline, do entirely throw continuity into the thunder bucket, make a hash of character motivations, and then, after that, still do freaky, weird, film-school-reject editing. But people love those, too, and again, I think there's that generational thing again.

And I've more or less made my peace with it. But please don't expect me to lavish any kind of praise on the prequels. They are terrible, terrible films. Not the worst films, but close enough to sight without scopes, and certainly the worst films to have such a hype machine attached. Like if LotR came out, and Frodo turned out to be played by Adam Sandler, and Gollum was just really flatulent, and everyone involved suddenly forgot how to make movies all at the same time.

[0] Hanging out with a bunch of undergrads, we watched 1980's The Shining together for Halloween, and - to a man and woman - they were universally bored out of their skins. The movie did not work on these people. That was my "aha!" moment. While I can't prove this, I think that a lot of film basics are obsoleted by the fact that the new generation regards camera position as more or less arbitrary. So a reveal might be just as likely to be frustrating as suspenseful.

[1] With the exception of TFA, which is an absolutely perfectly made soft reboot of ANH. I mean, seriously. It's the same movie, a sleazy cheap move that makes me feel all greasy. I think it's the cynicism of that decision that gave me the bad taste. No, wait, it was when I realized that none of the events of TLJ mattered, at all. None of the characters accomplish anything - the movie did not have to exist. So that was a bad taste too. Still watchable. There's like, a good ninety minute movie hiding in there somewhere. The third one, I just kind of lost track of anything, like watching a compilation of unrelated music videos.

I agree with most you have to say, personally I think the only movie that really holds weight since Disney took over is rogue One. andor is a good watch too. the mandalorian is great as well.

Mando and Andor finally got it. Or, more accurately, they knew what the rest of us did, that the purpose of the medium - any medium - is to tell a story. The finbros and Disney people, not being normal humans, are (hopefully, were) trying to deliver a Star Wars experience. Yeah, whatever the hell that means (anytime my job description has the word "Experience" in it, that's almost always a red flag).

Did MCU not teach you anything, Disney? "Hey, I got a great idea for a Western . ." bam! Logan. "Do you know, what if we had like a cold war paranoia spy movie and . ." bam! Winter Solider. "Dang, so if you have a heist movie, but the twist is we have a shrink ray and . . "bam! Ant-Man. Tie all of 'em up with a McGuffin, a Big Bad, and, ding, instant cinematic universe. See what we did there? We made stories first. It's also, incidentally, what the great Star Wars video games did as well. Even the not-so-great; the elite storm trooper who loses her faith is frickin' amazing (damn, Finn got robbed, screenplay-wise . . also, again, his character does not need to exist . . goddammit, stop wasting my time, Finbro Disney People!).

Probably "Don't Waste Anyone's Time" is a good one sentence screenwriting lesson.

Anyhoosit. Enough grousing from this old fart.

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