Jar Jar Binks makes C3PO look like, fucking, Shaft!
C3PO also doesn’t come across as a Stepin Fetchit-level racist caricature.
C3P0 can speak Bocce! 
As somebody once pointed out, the closest thing Jar-Jar has to a counterpart in the STAR WARS movies is Yoda. No, not Yoda the way you remember him. No, not Yoda the way he was, most of the time. Yoda as he first appears, when he’s just a goofball who seems cowardly and foolish and prone to slapstick – but the serious-minded Jedi grudgingly puts up with it, because of the mangled-English claim that the silly muppet knows a guy who could be useful.
Course, that act gets dropped pretty fast; he soon reveals he is the philosophical master of ancient wisdom in general, and of talking down to people in particular. Still, imagine an EMPIRE STRIKES BACK where that’s not the case: where he keeps acting like Grover on drugs the whole time, even while being chosen to serve as a General and then as a Senator, picture that, and you’ve got Jar-Jar.
As a thought experiment, what if the Jedi ran into, say, Boss Nass - who then guided them to the Gungan city and later led the Gungan army against the droids? One can argue that Nass is just as ridiculously stereotypical as JJ, but I’ll take all the Brian Blessed I can get.
On reflection, once the Jedi make contact with the Gungans to enlist their later help against the droids, Jar-Jar (or his possible Boss Nass replacement) really serves no purpose at all - he’s utterly useless on Tattooine and Coruscant and indeed could be absent through the middle two-thirds of the film to no effect at all.
Shut your mouth!
C-3PO was merely a mincing, fussy, worrywart. But a lot of the time he did give useful information (primarily acting as translator for R2) and he usually knew when to keep quiet.
Jar-Jar was a retarded, bumbling, 100% completely useless alien in black-face (Oooo 'dare massa Obi-Wans!!). There was never, ever, EVER a single reason to keep him around (other than his very first scene showing the way to that undersea city) and every reason to deliberately ditch him immediately*!* He was the literal manifestation that brought the prequels down to preteen, childish, toy commercials…
I’ve seen Ahmed Best talk about the voice, which is obviously one of the worst things in the prequels.
He gave Lucas a lot of choices of voices. The one you hear in the movie was the one Lucas picked as the voice. Ahmed Best is pretty much a victim of Lucas wanting a high-pitch annoying voice.
He’s goofy, anyway, but from the moment he said, “Hey, wait!”, I knew the voice was the key thing that was irritating.
Well, Yoda had a stupid way of talking and people loved him.
But every time Yoda spoke, whether it was some philosophical wisdom or not, all I could picture was Grover from Sesame Street.
Someone correct me if I’m wrong, or support me if I’m right, but I have a vague memory that Lucas originally intended C3PO to be a smart-talking, slick con man-type of character. Can’t remember where I heard or read it, though. How different would that have been!
It’d be like if Bender was in Star Wars. “Hey Vadar, kiss my shiny metal ass!”
Not Grover. Fozzy Bear.
Everything in the prequels is worse. C-3PO in Attack of the Clones is horribly unfunny, the whole switcheroo with his head on the battle droid body. Just as bad as Jar Jar in TPM.
Also, first post!
Yes Grover. Frank Oz did the voice for both muppets, Grover & Fozzy Bear. Maybe Yoda reminded you of Fozzy, but I never watched The Muppet Show but had watched Sesame Street as a kid, so for me, it was Grover that was the Jedi trainer.
I read somewhere that J** was originally supposed to be the evil mastermind / Sith Master and acted in the buffoonish way to disguise that.
Yes, as mentioned above, C3PO **is **just as annoying as Jar Jar - when C3PO is written like Jar Jar. The key to the differences between the original trilogy C3PO and the prequel trilogy Jar Jar is the quality of the writing, which fundamentally encompasses all of the points made in the thread.
And of course, just about everything else that went wrong in the prequels also came down to the writing - bad dialogue, bad characters, bad plot, all of it.
Yep, definitely Grover. I was a fan of both Grover and Fozzy, and never once did I doubt Yoda was using Grover’s voice!
His voice is not irritating or annoying. And, he’s wise.
I’ve heard that too. Specifically I heard it as C-3PO being a slimy used-car salesman type. You can see remnants of it in the scene where Uncle Owen is looking him over preparatory to buying him, and Threepio has a positive answer to everything Owen asks.
3PO: Protocol? I’m all about protocol. Why I’ve forgotten more about protocol than most droids–
Owen: I don’t need a protocol droid.
3PO: Of course you don’t! Protocol sucks, who needs it? Why I oughta–
Owen: Know anything about vaporators?
3PO: Vaporators? Boy, does that take me back! Remind me to tell you about my first job, when I–
Owen: I need a droid that speaks Bocce.
3PO: Bocce? My God, many’s the time I used to sit around with the old gang, speaking Bocce and–