Most Hated Star Wars Character Would’ve Been Much Better Before Massive Changes
Jar Jar Binks was supposed to be more childlike and innocent in Stars Wars: The Phantom Menace before George Lucas changed the character.
After the first three Star Wars films were released in the 1970s and early 1980s, every other Star Wars film has been subjected to intense criticism by fans – and sometimes even flat-out hate. One of the characters that the franchise’s fans love to hate the most in Star Wars is Jar Jar Binks, whose speech pattern and clumsiness made him seem just plain ridiculous. According to ScreenRant, though, he wasn’t meant to be this way. Instead, he was supposed to be more “childlike than childish.”
In the original draft of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, Jar Jar Binks was more innocent and less of a physical embodiment of comic relief. He was meant to be like a scared kid thrown into a situation that’s out of his depth when he’s ordered to help Obi-Wan Kenobi. In the film version, however, he seems like a completely unnecessary distraction from the plot most of the time.
In the original Star Wars: The Phantom Menace script, Jar Jar Binks was also lacking the strange voice he has in the movie as we know it – instead he just spoke plain English. He was still clumsy, but this was more of an endearing trait than a play at slapstick comedy.
To the dismay (and irritation) of many longtime Star Wars fans, Jar Jar Binks’ quirks were amped up to annoying levels because George Lucas was trying to appeal to a younger audience. Unfortunately for him, this alienated a lot of the hardcore Star Wars fans, who found such a ridiculous character to be out of place in a film with serious themes like politics and life-or-death decision-making.
This changing of Star Wars’ Jar Jar Binks from who he was on the page to who he was in the film turned out to be a very bad decision on George Lucas’s part. Sure, the films were still a success, but Jar Jar was such a hated character (even more so than the actual villains in the film) that Ahmed Best, the actor who played him, was barraged with hate from fans for years. It was so bad that it even affected his mental health, and possibly cost him other movie roles.
It wasn’t until 2015, 16 years after Star Wars: The Phantom Menace was initially released, that fans started to maybe, possibly, potentially consider changing their opinion on Jar Jar Binks. The reason behind this was a fan theory posted on Reddit in which it is posited that Jar Jar was actually a skilled user of the Force and was even in league with Palpatine from the beginning, just faking his ineptitude all along.
For some reason, fans were more willing to believe that one of Star Wars’ silliest characters was actually a crafty, powerful villain than to accept that he was just poorly rewritten, and so their cold hearts began to warm up again toward Jar Jar Binks.
That theory wasn’t correct (or really even very plausible), but it did give Star Wars’ Jar Jar Binks a reason for being in the film and for acting in the way he did. It was all an act, they say, which is one way to make the character easier to watch, even without knowing that he actually could have been a decent character if George Lucas had not changed the way he was originally written.
