No, I’m not going to argue that he’s okay – I hate him too. But I sat down with the videotape, watched it, and tried to examine my feelings. Why does this character inspire such universal disgust? Is it just because he looked fake? Well, Yoda looked fake, in all the movies he appeared, and nobody hates him.
Is it just because he’s so obviously intended to be funny and he’s not? Maybe, but still, that doesn’t seem to explain the magnitude of vitriol directed at him.
This one character, many would say, ruined “The Phantom Menace” by virtue of his presence. How?
For me, the explanation lies in his design, in how he looks. Are you familiar with what Konrad Lorenz said, that we tend to “like” animals that look like human babies, with small chins, big foreheads, and enormous eyes? We also tend to “like” the young of other mammalian species, like monkeys and dogs, that most resemble human babies. We say they are “cute” and “cuddly”. We generally do not refer to lizard-like creatures as “cute” and “cuddly”. The iguana in Foxtrot, you may notice, is deliberately drawn so as to appear rounder and more “cuddly”.
Yoda has a small chin, a big forehead, and enormous eyes, so we like him. He is also small and round, so we think he’s “cute”. Jar Jar is distinctly lizardlike in aspect; he has a long nose, small piggy eyes (see the adjective “piggy” I just automatically used?), and long, helplessly, flailing limbs. He is not “cute” or “cuddly”.
Also, Yoda is a Jedi master, and has an attractive personality. We respect him. Jar Jar is a twerp. We do not respect him.
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!” - the White Queen
It might also have something to do with age and Lord Lucas making a bold-faced attempt to grab the younger demographic who were born after ROTJ.
Jar Jar was a big distraction for me; I could hardly stomach the movie on first viewing because of him. The second time, I was ready for it… I turned on my “Crap filters” and paid attention to the background plot of the movie, the coup d’etat.
Your posts are always good Cactus Jack, just BANG BANG.
Regards,
Jai Pey
Thanks, Jai Pey. BANG BANG! I lost my %$#^ing ear!
Notthemama.
I’d heard that stuff about the babies, somewhere, and didn’t know the name of the guy who came up with it. It makes some sense to me, sure, although it absolutely astounds me that Lucas and his creature effects shop wouldn’t be aware of it, that they’d make something EXACTLY the opposite of that which should be appealing. How many years of study do those guys go through? How many alien designs have they come up with? It’s INCREDIBLE that they missed the boat on Jar Jar.
He might have been more appealing if he was… cool. You know, if he did things kind of like Chewbacca, instead of like the Three Stooges. What if he was an awesome fighter, quiet, effective, reserved, deadly with a blaster, instead of a stupid fop?
Well, they’re stuck with him, the way he’s designed, now. He’s apparrently gonna be in the other movies. Maybe the only way they can rescue him is by shifting his character somewhat, and show that after all the wars he’s been through, the death he’s seen, the corruption of friends, he’s grown serious, become a “take no prisoners” warrior, and now he’s even a little sad. As a kind of lizardy guy, maybe we could buy into that and even find him kind of appealing.
Actually, that sounds like an interesting thing, something that would be good for the plot. In such a way, he might mirror the fall of Anakin. And viewing “The Phantom Menace” with the knowledge of how this carefree, stupid goof was, by subsequent events, turned into a killer might actually make us like him, in retrospect, in The Phantom Menace. It’d be a little like, when you’re depressed, maybe you look at photos of when you were a little kid and think, “See how happy I was then. I didn’t know how it was going to turn out.”
I think it would be a great plotline if Jar-jar became Boba Fett.
He’d need different feet, and he’d have to get significantly shorter.
Part of the problem was he was so damn hard to understand. And his accent was vaguely offensive, like an old black-faced minstrel show or something, with some ridiculous Jamaican thrown in.
He was also the least-cool and most annoyingly over-the-top character I can recall from any of the Star Wars movies.
Give me immortality, or give me death!
Here’s another perspective.
http://www.landoverbaptist.org/news0899/jar.html
You MUST check this out.
Omigod, Scylla, that site is unbelievable! Some of the other pages there are equally hysterical/appalling. Finally, people who decided that it would be easier to enter the kingdom of heaven by making their minds narrow enough to fit through the eye of the needle. But I digress from the OP…
I agree with Milossarian’s assessment of Jar Jar’s character. I’ll also make a WAG and say that the level of vitriol is partly related to the fact that as a lone character, he’s an easy target. How many people really liked the Ewoks, another blatant attempt to play to the little kids who weren’t old enough to have seen New Hope and Empire? (C’mon, really.) I remember being annoyed by them a lot, but there was no single Ewok you could be ticked off at. Jar Jar sticks out in Phantom Menace like a lone tree on a golf course, waiting to be struck by lightning.
For me, the issue wasn’t just Jar Jar Binks, it was his whole species. There is a limit to the extent I wish to suspend my disbelief when watching a science fiction movie (otherwise I’d just dial up Attack of the Killer Tomatoes all the time).
In the first three movies, one was asked on more than one occaision to swallow the reality of made for movie species regularly. I mean, don’t you have to do that for Chewbacca every time? But at least the effort needed most of the time wasn’t too great.
But Jar Jar Binks and his species were so totally unrealistic that you couldn’t help but think of them as artificial. Their ruler was so silly and ridiculous that I almost laughed out loud in the theater seeing him the first time. The stupid attempt at some sort of patois speech didn’t help at all.
In short, they were stupidly made, badly portrayed, and totally beyond reality. Jar Jar added nothing but inappropriate comic ‘relief’ to the movie. It was bad enough that little Anakin Skywalker was sleepwalking through the movie; we could have done without the ‘laughs’ provided by the floppy eared sidekick.
Because he combined the worst traits of Scrappy-Doo and Urkel.
Fillet:
You do know that the Landover Baptist Church page is a parody, right?
No I didn’t, Twin. Thank you for pointing that out. ::sighs with relief:: Is it supposed to be a parody of the Westboro Baptist Church website?
I have an onion link for every occasion.
http://www.theonion.com/onion3527/jarjar_merchandise.html
Why do I loath Jar-Head Binks? Probably for the same reason I am totally disgusted by Blarney, the puking dinosaur. It’s so far below me that I can’t make any sense of him.
In the Phantom Menace, Jar-Jar was a poor attempt to inject some kiddy draw into a movie that should have been geared towards the mid-teen to adult audience.
I’ll agree that the Ewoks were an attempt to draw little kids into the Lucas money machine, but at least they weren’t perpetually clumsy and moronically stupid.
So, I hate Jar-Head Binks because he interfered with my enjoyment of the movie by bringing in pre-school humor and taking up too much screen time. (That, and there’s that one scene where Qui is talking to him but looking at Jar-Heads upperchest. The CGI animators could and should have done better there!)
To me, it’s obvious. Jar Jar is annoying because of his speech. His voice is pitched right in the middle of the Helium-Induced Maximum Annoyance range, and his colloquialisms consist of using specially modified, cutesy pronouns like “meesa” and “yousa”.
I think JarJar is just a bad stereotype of a Jamaican.
I guess he’d be funny for children (which was intended), but for adults it’s too crack-over-the-head slapstick to be amusing.
Actually, all the bad guys and incompetants are ‘ethnic’ in “Menace”. Even what’s his name’s henchmen sound Chinese.
Why is Jar-Jar so annoying…oh, brother. He runs around like a chicken with his head getting cut off (to overuse the phrase), yelling about him-sa gettin’ real scared.
His dialect, as so many have pointed out, is an atrocious stereotype of Caribbean inhabitants.
He seems to have taken over Darth Maul’s important (?) role…I say this because Darth Maul appears in - what, 3 scenes??? My question is, why the heck did he get so much hype when he’s not in the movie for more than maybe 10 minutes tops?
And his Gungan grammar is just plain bad. I just felt compelled to point this last bit out as a future teacher.
Christopher Robin Hood - he steals from the rich and gives to the Pooh.
For the record, I hate Yoda.
Cheese Log, Cheese Log, cylindrical and yellow!
Cut the Cheese Log and I’m a happy fellow!
Your’e all missing the real villain. Jar Jar Binks was annoying but that kid made me wince in pain.
He bellowed all his lines out in a shrill piercing monotone. He looked completly distracted and acted uninvested in his role. He was so cloying and repulsive, that I refused to belive he could grow to become Darth Vader.
All in all, he reminded me of a bad parody of Opie from the old Andy Griffith show.
There are good child actors out there like the kid from sixth sense, or Edward Furlong from T2. Why Lucas chose this one for Annakin is beyond me.
Perked Ears indicate curiosity - Know Your Cat