I have heard about this for a couple years, but my teenaged son has become increasingly emphatic about trying to convince me. He just sent me a video that does seem to have more evidence and logic behind it than what I had seen before.
But obviously it’s all cherrypicked (even if it’s true, it’s a selective, prosecutorial argument). What counter-evidence has been left out? Other than RotS, I’ve only seen the prequels once, when they first came out; so I turn to the SW experts here to rebut this theory. Or endorse it? Surprisingly, extensive searching found many SDMB mentions of Jar Jar, but nothing about this; so I don’t know where you guys stand.
That’s not a counterargument, though, on multiple levels:
(1) George Lucas no longer has control of the SW canon. He instead has control of $2 billion in cash (if he hasn’t blown it somehow) and nearly $6 billion in Disney stock (it was $2 billion in 2012 when he sold Lucasfilm to Disney, but if he hasn’t sold it off, that’s what it’s worth now).
(2) Even if he did still have control, the proponents of this theory acknowledge that Lucas “lost his nerve” and didn’t follow through on his alleged master plan in the conclusion of the prequel trilogy, Revenge of the Sith.
So what I’m asking is not, “Is this canon?” but something more like "Is there evidence in the first two films of the prequel trilogy, or in contemporaneous accounts of Lucas’s thinking (that we can trust) that rebut the idea that this had been what he was building toward until substituting Count Duku for Jar-Jar in RotS? Can all the circumstantial evidence in that video be explained away?
What about the point the video makes that Yoda initially appears to be a fool, an annoying pest, before it is revealed that he is a wise and powerful Jedi master?
The theory is finding a pattern after the fact. Like seeing shapes in a cloud. There is no way in the world it was intentional. That doesn’t make it dumb or not fun to talk about but to try and say, “This is really what Lucas meant” is wrong.
THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK is the only SW film of the first 6 that doesn’t have Lucas with a screenplay credit (only story). So that wasn’t even his “writing” anyway.
In fairness, he did have the drably-clad handmaiden turn out to have been the queen all along, just like he has the avuncular senator later show his true colors.
(One of those was done more subtly than the other, but he was trying, anyhow.)
However, there is one small flaw in the theory. If Darth Binks is trying to hide his powers from the Jedi, then why does Jar Jar do a 20 foot force jump right on front of Qui Gon and Obi Wan?
Boy, oh boy! That’s some serious stupidity and way too much time on somebody’s hands. Also, Paul McCartney is dead and the lyrics to American Pie are really deep…
While I’m not a Star Wars expert (nor even a fan), I’d say that there are three key arguments against the idea:
Lucas had three movies to do something with the idea, if it was real, and didn’t do so. And, if he had made more movies, they would have been sequels to the original series, too far in the future to really bring Jar Jar back and reveal him to be a Dark Jedi.
All of the things that hint about Jar Jar having super powers can be easily explained as the result of him being a computer generated character, unbound by the laws of physics, as continuity issues, and by his being a comedy character. You could probably make a similar argument that most of the furniture in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast are Jedis.
The same man who named Porkins (a fat guy), Darth Sidious (an insidious guy), and Darth Vader (a fatherly guy) named Jar Jar Binks, Jar Jar Binks. Subtlety is not his forte.
(1) The claim though is that he chickened out on his original plan due to fans’ reactions. But whatever the truth, it is kind of weird to have the comedy character intended to be beloved by children be the instrument of the Republic’s undoing even if he was an unwitting one. It was never the case with other Lucas cuddly/comedy characters, that they materially aided the bad guys.
(2) Fair argument.
(3) I personally don’t believe he intended Darth Vader to be Luke’s father when he made the original film. The explanation from Obi-Wan that the story he told Luke was true “from a certain point of view” was just so awkward, it screams “retcon”.
The former exists solely to be a misdirection, the latter is clear to any audience member smarter than a potted fern to be a duplicitous villain. There is no dimensionality beyond those traits. Moreover, I read one hypothesis that the handmaiden plot point exist for absolutely no reason other than Lucas desired to show off how much of a lookalike Natalie Portman and Keira Knightly were.