Jar Jar Binks is easily the most reviled thing in Star Wars history, and it's easy to see why: the character is utterly pointless, working as bad comic relief in a movie that doesn't really need it. While there was a lot about the Prequel Trilogy that was downright awful, even without the infamous Gungan, Jar Jar is basically the unofficial mascot for the worst films in the franchise.
That being said, it's easy to forget that, before The Phantom Pain hit theaters, George Lucas and Star Wars were surefire successes. Sure, the 1997 Special Edition made some entirely unnecessary changes, but it was still Star Wars — how could anyone in 1999 have known where the series was headed?
If your first response is "the team working on it," well ... that's when things get complicated. Just look at Ahmed Best, the actor who played Jar Jar Binks — nowadays, it's easy to see where things went wrong, but things were different when The Phantom Menace was filming:
It's easy to forget that, for the time, Jar Jar was actually something new. As Best describes:
"One of the biggest reasons why I took it was because of the challenge of it, and it hadn't been done before. There was no Andy Serkis or Gollum; there was no Na'vi from Avatar. There were no Martians from John Carter to kind of be the template for this. So I was kind of working with George to pioneer this new character form of acting and storytelling."
While that doesn't necessarily excuse Jar Jar's presence in the film, it does add quite a bit of context: in a lot of ways, Jar Jar was uncharted territory. Jurassic Park pioneered CG characters in 1993, but they weren't nearly as complex as Jar Jar Binks — not only were the dinosaurs at a distance, but they never had to talk or articulate like an actual humanoid. Trying to capture that sort of performance when the Sega Dreamcast was a thing probably wasn't the easiest process,
And then there's the fact that George Lucas was still ... well, George Lucas. Before the Prequel Trilogy hit theaters, he was still the mastermind behind the original Star Wars films — it's easy to think that most of the people working on set just assumed Lucas knew what he was doing with a script filled with Gungans and fart jokes. Such an excuse wouldn't really work for Episode II and III, but could help explain a lot of what happened with The Phantom Menace.
Thankfully, The Force Awakens mostly ignored the Prequel Trilogy — for the time being, it looks like everyone can finally let Jar Jar Binks fade into obscurity.
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