9 - Jar Jar Binks

How to ruin your film in one easy step

‘I hate Jar Jar Binks’ is a topic almost as overdone as ‘Little Britain's catchphrases, but the fundamental truth is that there’s still no excuse for this pink, floppy-eared loser. The worst thing about Jar Jar Binks is that the high-up honchos at Lucasfilm probably genuinely believed that he was an amazing triumph for the film effects industry. I don’t care if he’s entirely computer generated; if I was a computer then I’d be ashamed of generating him.

When ‘The Phantom Menace’ was cruelly unleashed on innocent ‘Star Wars’ fans in the late 1990s and the fans had the temerity to disabuse Binks, George Lucas blamed the audience. 'There is a group of fans for the films that doesn't like comic sidekicks. They want the films to be tough like Terminator, and they ge very upset and opinionated about anything that has anything to do with being childlike,' he told the BBC.

Comedy? Surely that was done far better with Han Solo’s dry humour in the original films, or even the rude R2D2 beeps? Why do you have to create some god-awful slapstick alien clown with a voice that’s somehow even more nauseatingly irksome than Barney the dinosaur’s? Slapstick clowns haven’t been funny for about 100 years, and even then I’m told they were still pretty rubbish. Putting one into ‘Star Wars’ was even more stupid than putting the Ewoks into ‘Return of the Jedi,’ and that took some doing.

How anyone can watch those films and not at any time think: ‘hmm, I want to put Jar Jar’s gormless face into a smoothie maker every time he opens his stupid mouth; maybe that won’t do wonders for making the audience sympathise with him?’ is beyond me. Still, I’m told the kids love him, but then the kids also love Dairylea Lunchables, so I’m going to treat their opinion with the disdain that it deserves.

If you really want to, you can actually see him in action again in the clip below we found on YouTube.

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