They’re both present when Han goes into the carbonite, although C3P0’s being carried in a backpack.
Something else that dawned on me and I didn’t see upthread: picture Threepio right after he’s (a) convinced Owen to buy him, and (b) recommended Artoo into getting purchased likewise: he’s happy; he’s satisfied to work on the farm, tending to the chores and maybe enjoying the occasional oil bath; he totally sells it; you totally believe it.
So if, as you watch the movie, you find yourself thinking I Wish He Wasn’t Here, you presumably add a quick And So Does He. You don’t blame him for hanging out with the adventurers, because you know that (a) he’d rather be elsewhere, and (b) he’s obliging the folks who drag him along. Unless you want him to wait outside, because you don’t want any trouble? I heartily agree, sir. Oh, you want me to stay here while you go off to rescue the princess? Indeed, sir; let me just ask what I should do if discovered, and then wait patiently until you tell us to rescue you, sir. Whatever you say, sir. I don’t mind, sir. Just doing my job, sir. Drop me at a space hotel and tell me to work the front desk, I’ll do that, sir. I’m not proud, sir.
Heck, when Obi-Wan starts telling Luke about Jedi swordsmanship, Threepio realizes he won’t be needed and politely asks permission to shut down for a while; that’s not an especially interesting or admirable character trait, but it beats the hell out of causing trouble as a center-of-attention bungler who insists on tagging along.
Huge agreement! I did mention, upthread, that Threepio knows when to shut up; Jar Jar never learns that most fundamental of social skills. He can’t escape his inner four-year-old.
But you make a sweet point, and one which, as you say, hadn’t been mentioned, that Threepio is happy in his role. He’s not only competent, but enjoys the kind of service he is uniquely made to perform. He boasts, not egotistically, but in hopes of being useful, of how many languages he knows.
It’s a little like Lumiere in Beauty and the Beast: Be Our Guest. He takes pleasure in being of use to people in a universe not necessarily designed around principles of customer service.
Sorry, I’m still not buying it. I think all of these are great rationalizations, and there is indeed truth in them. But I think the answer to “Why is Jar Jar Binks Annoying…but C3PO isn’t?” lies a bit closer to home.
How old were you guys when you first saw Star Wars?
I’m pretty firmly convinced that those who first saw C-3PO as *kids *like him just fine, while those who first saw him as *adults *(which is a fairly small group of people) find him annoying. Likewise, my kid and his friends, who saw the prequels as kids, didn’t find Jar Jar annoying until they grew up enough to learn that Jar Jar is annoying. All the people who saw the prequels as adults taught them that.
Both characters are annoying to adults, and not annoying to kids. We forgive C-3PO his annoyingness because we liked him as kids. Jar Jar doesn’t get the same slack.
Sorry, I know this is blaspheming the Holy Trilogy, but…they just aren’t that good. They were good when we were 8. To 8 year olds, the prequels were just as good.
I’m way late to the party, but here’s my take:
First, C3PO is annoying. I may not have become fully aware of this until SW7 just came out, but there were only a few short scenes with him in it, and that was enough to highlight that I’d actually prefer him to not be there.
Second, there is always a fine line in comedy between “funny” and “stupid” or “offensive” and it’s hard to predict where that line is. Stand up comedians are always struggling to find just where that line is. Even the ones that have an intentionally stupid or offensive act are still working to avoid being too stupid or too offensive.
C3PO is not all that different than Jar Jar, but he’s just barely on this side of funny. Jar Jar is just barely on that side of funny. Jar Jar without the accent might have worked. Or with the accent, but less overall stupidity… or, honestly, even in a movie that had less slapstick going on elsewhere. The prequels (TPM in particular) had a lot of juvenile humor, including the obligatory fart jokes. As a whole, it was just too much.
Third, TPM as a movie is just plain terrible all around. It’s not unusual for people to pin a failure on specific things, even if they’d accept the same things in an movie that’s better overall. (I suspect Ewoks are tolerated by SW fans only because ROTJ is a solid movie. Had Ewoks been introduced in TPM, I think we’d be talking about how Wickett ruined everything.)
Let’s remember that Threepio is at his least annoying in Star Wars. In Empire he’s a little more annoying, in Return of the Jedi his even more annoying, and he’s super-annoying in the Prequels, and treated as a joke in The Force Awakens.
But look at how he’s treated differently in “A New Hope”. He’s the audience introduction to the galaxy. He makes mistakes, but they’re realistic mistakes, not pratfalls.
But by “Empire” Han and Leia can barely tolerate him. They treat him like an annoyance, they don’t listen to him, they barely notice when he disappears. Chewie seems a bit upset that they dismembered him, but Leia can’t even bother to pretend, she’s just annoyed that they broke her toaster.
This does not bode well for BB-8.
Incidentally, on the strength of the Indiana Jones franchise and the Star Wars films and so on, Harrison Ford is currently at the top of Box Office Mojo’s by-gross People Index. And you can maybe guess a lot of the Top Ten: there’s Tom Cruise, who gets MISSION:IMPOSSIBLE money plus his individual blockbusters; for Gary Oldman, it’s Batman money plus Harry Potter money; and Samuel L. Jackson, well, c’mon.
And right behind Ian McKellen, with Magneto money and Gandalf money rocketing him to #14, Anthony Daniels is #15 – and Daniels has two more of these on the way, right? I’m thinking that’s a metric that might need a little tweak…
I was two, but I don’t think your idea holds water.
For one thing, Star Wars was not viewed as a “kid’s movie” when it came out, and the majority of it’s box office success was due to adults and older teens. Movies made for eight year olds didn’t make the cover of Time magazine. They don’t get nominated for Best Picture. They don’t get interminable PBS specials talking about myth arcs. (Note that I’m not saying these things show the movie was good, just that it was viewed as something adults would have a natural interest in.) There’s a good argument to be made that the films were created primarily with Lucas’s peer group in mind - that he was more interested in speaking to young people his own age who had grown up on Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, then in making a movie for little kids.
Secondly, while it is hard for me to separate the inherent quality of the films from my nostalgic love of them, I can’t help but notice that I don’t have that problem with any of the other movies and TV shows I loved as a kid. I spent as much time (if not more) with GI Joes and Transformers in all their various media configurations than I ever did with Star Wars, but my affection for those franchises is purely nostalgic. I can get a kick out of watching the original, animated Transformers movie, because I loved it when I was a kid, but I’m under no illusions that it’s actually quality.
Lastly, as you noted yourself, kids who grew up with Phantom Menace eventually grow out of liking Jar-Jar. But kids who grew up with Star Wars are still okay with C-3PO. And, at the risk of repeating my point from the previous paragraph, C-3PO seems to be kind of unique in that regard: there’s not a whole lot of unironic fan love for Orko, or Snarf, or any of the other “wacky” sidekicks that were de rigeur in children’s television when we were growing up.
Indeed, it seems that the kids who were into Phantom Menace seem to be largely outgrowing Phantom Menace, too, just like kids from my generation outgrew most of the movies that obsessed us when we were little - except Star Wars. Again, I’m not saying this to argue for objective quality. The fact that they’re still popular at all this many decades doesn’t mean that they’re good movies. But they got some sort of alchemy right, that the prequels didn’t, because Disney didn’t just make all the money in the world by producing a slightly reskinned version of Phantom Menace.
I was 25 when the original came out. I didn’t think C-3PO was particularly annoying. He was comic relief, and kind of amusing.
None of my friends who were in the same age range, many of whom went to see Star Wars multiple times, mentioned that they were annoyed by C-3PO.
As Miller says, the original trilogy wasn’t regarded as being kids movies, any more than movies about comic book heroes are just for kids today. They were enormously popular with college students and other people in their twenties.
It seems to me that Jar-Jar didn’t fit the “tone” of the prequels. On the surface, the movies appear to deal with weighty subject matter (the rise of disorder and war in utopia, and the “fall” of a hero [Anakin]) in a story telling manner that varies between “sinister mystery” and “impending doom”. IMO, Jar-Jar clashes too much with that vibe. Jar-Jar is “jarring”.
Consider: we have a large battle between the Gunguns and the droid army. The stakes are said to be high, and it’s not too absurd to believe that some of the Gunguns may lose their lives. (Of course, ultimately, we don’t actually see these deaths on screen…>< ) But here’s Jar-Jar! Oh look, he’s doing his best imitation of Jerry Lewis physical comedy! Isn’t he funny?? Uh, no. He’s clashing with the tone of the story. He’s the fly in the soup.
As an aside, the webcomic Darths and Droids (which posits that the Star Wars movies were actually a role-playing campaign) presents Jar-Jar, Threepio, and Yoda as all being played by the same player. She was eight years old when she started playing Jar-Jar, which explains a lot about him, but she’s matured a bit since then.
Jar-Jar was just a lot more over-the-top than C-3PO. C-3PO was a prissy-pants, and annoying in the same way as Felix Unger or Sheldon Cooper. Jar-Jar was just a total buffoon. The only movie he would have fit in would have been a complete farce.
You’ve touched on something that I recently realized after watching the originals again. The original trilogy did the same thing for droids that, say, Apple did for home computers: they’re appliances that are taken for granted.
Look at the very first battle scene in A New Hope. C3PO and R2D2 scoot across the hallway right in the middle of a firefight between stormtroopers and rebels. The stormtroopers don’t attempt to shoot the droids — they see them as a non-factor … and the rebels don’t stop shooting — droids are easily replaceable appliances. On the Death Star, when stormtroopers are charging into battle, there are droids underfoot, and the stormtroopers casually step around them without a second glance, the same way you automatically avoid knocking over the blender with your elbow when you walk into your kitchen.
Keep in mind that, when the droids scoot across the corridor in the middle of that firefight, at that point in the movie they are still the only major characters we’ve met, the only characters we could possibly care about at that point … and they’re completely ignored by both sides.
Yup. To the average person, they’re toasters.
The fact that they didn’t get hit could be taken as evidence that the stormtroopers were shooting at them. 
My problem with this read is that it seems a bit too “think of the children!” Kids have no idea of the history or cultural context. They see a funny frog man.
Educated adults can see the problems with it and talk around in circles about why its nuanced/uncomfortable/outrageous/etc. No child sees Jar Jar and sees what we see.
And that is part of the reason the Gollywog is no longer acceptable in polite society. We do need to “think of the children” when the humour is based on racist stereotyping.
This. Good GOD, the never-ending Hurricane of Puns for 3PO during the Battle of Genonosis while the Jedi were being killed left and right!
nm
I was 23 when Star Wars came out in 1977. Didn’t find him annoying then, and didn’t find him annoying a few weeks ago when my wife and son and I watched the original trilogy over the MLK weekend.