All Things Star Wars

[Sommerswerd]

My theory is that the felt size of the SW galaxy is a storytelling trap. (It's a trap!) One thinks of the Senate, with each of those little floating decks representing a system. "There must be room in such a place for other stories," we think to ourselves. But that whole space had and overcame a threat scaled to it: a weapon that could destroy whole planets. Any other story you try to tell in that galaxy must have reference to that story. Any new threat has, somehow, to be bigger or else everyone will say, "Hey, we just faced down a planet-destroying weapon; why do you expect us to care about your puny threat?" But nothing really can be bigger. And any story set during the Empire has to be in reference to it because that is what was going on in the galaxy at that time. Remember, it reached even to the Tatooine system, which Luke characterized as the place farthest from any bright center of the universe. Everyone who tries to tell a story in the SW galaxy is automatically forced to tell a smaller story than the one told in the OT, and a derivative story, one that can't set its own most basic terms.

Make a new galaxy. Tell its story.

Star Trek uses the "mirror dimension" (and time travel) to address this... and Marvel/DC have decided to use the multiverse (along with time travel) to do essentially the same thing.

 

[Gori the Grey]

Star Trek's universe isn't a finite space. They're out exploring and they can run into some new thing every episode. The Death Star threat fills up the entirety of the SW galaxy. Once it's overcome, there's nothing else meaningful that can go on in that galaxy, even though it seems there's so much space for new stories to happen.

I'm not sure Marvel is out of the woods on this front, though. They've had their all-consuming threat, and as Captain Marvel revealed, it had to be fought across the whole of our universe. And look at how disappointing most viewers have found most of the movies since the Infinity War was concluded. Marvel has used up our universe for story telling.

 

[AdrienIer]

I am a little disappointed that Ventress really was just a cameo, but I'm otherwise satisfied and really appreciative of the ending they went with.

Spoiler :

Yeah good ending to the season. Still really surprised that they set up so much of Palpatine's plans that are supposed to lead to ep 9, then had all that setup destroyed in the last episode. The destruction of so much of that necessary research makes it seem like a different timeline where Palpatine's cloning projects didn't work out.

 

[Laurana Kanan]

New Acolyte banner has been making the rounds. A new, unknown character is pictured on the right.

 

[Laurana Kanan]

 

[Laurana Kanan]

 

[JohannaK]

Ah scheiss, it looks gorgeous

 

[Sommerswerd]

The Leia poster or The Acolyte trailer?

 

[Patine]

Fun fact. George Lucas offered the role of Han Solo to Burt Reynolds first in the mid-'70's, but he turned it down, just like he turned down being offered the role of James Bond in the 1969 007 movie, On Her Majesty's Secret Service.

 

[Clubber Lang]

Reynold's as Solo and Sally Field as Leia, i can picture it.



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[JohannaK]

The Leia poster or The Acolyte trailer?

The trailer ofc

 

[Gori the Grey]

Lovely piece in NYT today about what it meant to Ahmed Best to bear the anti Jar-Jar hate, but how things have come around for him in the years since.

 

[Sommerswerd]

No link/quote?

 

[Laurana Kanan]

No link/quote?

It's paywalled. Though, you could Google it and find other free articles discussing what he said. It's also something Ahmed has discussed quite a bit over the years, so it's not really anything new.

 

[Sommerswerd]

Star Trek's universe isn't a finite space. They're out exploring and they can run into some new thing every episode. The Death Star threat fills up the entirety of the SW galaxy. Once it's overcome, there's nothing else meaningful that can go on in that galaxy, even though it seems there's so much space for new stories to happen.

Which is why TFA damn near breaks the 4th wall in introducing what was, a shameless re-tread of the Death Star. They basically admitted, in-story, that they had nowhere to go from there... no way to top the Death Star as the ultimate threat... at least not one they could/ cared to come up with.

I'm not sure Marvel is out of the woods on this front, though. They've had their all-consuming threat, and as Captain Marvel revealed, it had to be fought across the whole of our universe. And look at how disappointing most viewers have found most of the movies since the Infinity War was concluded. Marvel has used up our universe for story telling.

Jonathan Majors was supposed to be the new, even more powerful Thanos, but that got all screwed up, for numerous reasons, both in-universe and RL.

That is one nice thing about Batman... his individual villains are usually more modest in terms of their power, so his conflicts don't suck up all the room in the universe... Of course, once Batman gets involved with the Justice League, the villains become cosmic in scale and we run into the problem you describe... the villain has to be powerful enough to be a credible threat, but then not so powerful/all-powerful, such that a) there is nothing more powerful to replace them once defeated; and b) the heroes have to be made OP just to be able to credibly defeat the villain.

One way I wish that the stories would start dealing with that is (again, the way Batman does), by not killing the villains, but rather beating them, for now... Superhero movies over the past few decades keep leaning into killing off the villains rather than engaging in ongoing/never-ending battles with them... and I think that is part of why we keep getting OP villains and OP heroes to fight them.

 

[Gori the Grey]

One way I wish that the stories would start dealing with that is (again, the way Batman does), by not killing the villains, but rather beating them, for now...

And the other thing this might help with would be that the only thing the movies can come up with to do is have the heroes fight against each other.

Thanos has four villain companions that show up in the Infinity War movies. They sort of lead the bug creatures through the Wakanda force field and maybe there's a time or two when face off with an Avenger or two. But they're relatively inert. I looked them up one time. Each of them has a name, specified powers; two of them are married to one another. You don't get any of that in the movie. I get it that you don't want to invest your super-power-devising imaginative powers in characters that are just going to be dead soon, but give us some interesting villains beside the boss and the grunts.

That said, the Joker always finding some way to escape Gotham prison gets tiresome, too.

Go buy a copy of the paper, ya skinflint. I'm trying to keep the Gray Lady alive.

 

[Clubber Lang]

No link/quote?

I was about to post it earlier but then deleted as i thought no one would be interested, here it is (i left out the pics).

JJ -

The Actor Who Played Jar Jar Binks Is Proud of His ‘Star Wars’ Legacy​

Ahmed Best recalls the painful backlash to the “Phantom Menace” character that was considered a racial stereotype at the time, but is now embraced by fans.

In the 1970s, “Star Wars” (Episode IV) was the first movie Ahmed Best ever saw in a cinema. Twenty years later, he was cast as Jar Jar Binks — the first character ever created with motion capture technology.

Ahmed Best is a futurist, an educator, a martial artist, a writer-director and the actor behind Jar Jar Binks, the most hated character in the “Star Wars” universe.

Long-eared Jar Jar is a bipedal amphibianlike creature with an ungainly walk and a winning attitude. The groundbreaking, computer-generated goofball debuted in the first installment of George Lucas’s prequel trilogy, “Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace,” and instantly set off widespread criticism from both fans and the press.

“It took almost a mortal toll on me. It was too much,” Best recently recalled. “It was the first time in my life where I couldn’t see the future. I didn’t see any hope. Here I was at 26 years old, living my dream, and my dream was over.”

Now 50, Best is the picture of panache who could easily be mistaken for an off-duty rock star. He arrived at our interview riding a motorcycle and wearing a blue denim jacket, black jeans and stylish shades.


Best has continued to play Jar Jar Binks in animated “Star Wars” shows and video games. “It’s big and it tends to overtake your life,” he said.

In the presence of Best’s self-assured demeanor, it’s even more shocking to learn that back in 1999 the vitriol fans flung at Jar Jar, and in turn at him, ravaged his mental health. But he revisited these memories a few weeks before the movie’s return to theaters on Friday to commemorate the 25th anniversary of its release.

Two constellations, “Star Wars” and “Star Trek,” nurtured Best’s curiosity for both science and the arts as a child in the South Bronx. The 1977 “Star Wars” (Episode IV) was the first movie he ever saw in a cinema. Back then, being part of the intergalactic saga seemed unfathomable.

Twenty years later, Best was performing in “Stomp,” the theater show where performers communicate through rhythm and acrobatics, when Robin Gurland, the casting director on “Phantom Menace,” attended a performance in San Francisco. She had spent months conducting an exhaustive search for the actor who could embody Jar Jar’s physicality. That evening she found him.

“There was just something so electrifying about his performance; it was natural and innovative,” Gurland said by phone. “I couldn’t take my eyes off of Ahmed.”

“What if you were from this other planet, totally different from anything we know? How would you move?” Gurland recalled asking Best during his audition at Skywalker Ranch. “He got it immediately and was able to just create this being out of thin air.”
Doug Chiang, the design director on “Phantom Menace,” remembered Lucas describing Jar Jar as a combination of the silent comedy stars Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Lucas ruled out a puppet for the alien creature, Chiang said, but still needed Jar Jar to appear grounded in reality to hold up against live actors onscreen.

“Even though this was a synthetic character, created out of ones and zeros, George wanted it to have a lot of expression,” Chiang said via video call. “The actor component was absolutely critical.”

Commonplace now, motion capture, the process of recording a person or object’s movement to serve as the basis for a digital entity, was mostly uncharted territory. Jar Jar became the first main character in a feature film created this way, though initially the filmmakers didn’t know if it would work.

When Best landed the part as well as the separate assignment to voice the character — providing a playful take he often used with his younger cousins — he thought “it was surreal,” he recalled, adding with a laugh, “I was like, ‘Why me?’ I wanted it, of course, and I’m glad George believed in me, a 23-year-old kid from the streets of New York.”

In Chiang’s view, “Ahmed’s role in this was very understated, and it’s heartbreaking that he didn’t receive the attention and accolade because Jar Jar was a breakthrough character.”

Best spent the better part of two years working with Lucas and Industrial Light & Magic; his acting provided the physical element for the foundational software Lucasfilm created for performance capture. “I’m not Jar Jar. We are Jar Jar,” Best said crediting the numerous artists involved at different stages of the character’s development.

But during filming, Best had doubts about the role. He credits co-star Ewan McGregor, who played Obi-Wan Kenobi, with helping him embrace Jar Jar’s inherent silliness. Best was on set with the rest of the cast, performing while wearing a suit and headpiece that resembled Jar Jar’s final look.

“In one of the first scenes we shot, I was having a hard time with the line ‘Weesa going home!’ because it didn’t feel right to me,” Best recalled. “And then Ewan said, ‘But how does it feel to Jar Jar?’ That’s when I thought, ‘I’m going to take my ego out of this.’”

When he saw the final rendering of Jar Jar onscreen, he was taken aback. “I was up there, and I wasn’t up there at the exact same time,” Best said. “Jar Jar moved like me and that was just a very odd feeling.”

Unfortunately, Jar Jar was a pioneering character in more ways than one. Critics said the character was a collection of racial stereotypes, “a Rastafarian Stepin Fetchit,” as The Wall Street Journal described him. One complaint was Jar Jar’s accent, which some perceived as derived from Jamaican patois.

“Everybody talks about Jar Jar’s accent,” said Best, who is of West Indian descent. “I read exactly what George wrote. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t an accent.”

“Back in the day, Chewbacca was seen as the Black character,” he continued. “And then Yoda was ridiculed for being an Asian stereotype. Then the Neimoidians were ridiculed for being an Asian stereotype. ‘Star Wars’ has had a history of being a lightning rod. That’s because it’s so successful.”

No matter the context, the onslaught of negative reactions in the nascent online forums of the late ’90s, as well as in traditional media, drove him to consider suicide, he said.

Looking back now, Best said Jar Jar “was probably also the first cyber-bullied pop culture character ever.” In his view there were other factors that contributed to the barrage, including racism among fans, something another “Star Wars” performer, Kelly Marie Tran, called out in 2018 when she endured online harassment. (He said he related to “Kelly Marie for sure. She’s a phenomenal actor” and the way she was treated was “completely unwarranted.”)

“There are a lot of people who want to see Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Darth Vader for the rest of their lives, and they don’t realize that ‘Star Wars’ is changing,” Best said. He noted that the “Star Wars” franchise had yet to have a movie centered on a Black protagonist and added with a laugh, “I’m available.”

But worse than the ceaseless public scrutiny was learning that his role had been dramatically reduced for the two sequels, “Attack of the Clones” and “Revenge of the Sith.”

“As an artist you want the respect from your peers, and I felt as if I was being scaled back because I didn’t do a good job,” he said. “It really hurt. Everybody was running away from me, including the people that I gave two years of my life to.”

Finding acting work post-“Star Wars” proved nearly impossible. The first hurdle was proving he had been in the movies: “When I’d tell people what I did as Jar Jar, they would be like, ‘That’s just animation. I don’t see your face, so how do I know it was you?’” Best recalled. “And I’d say, ‘No, it was me. I’m an actor; it’s called motion capture.”

He admitted that even all these years later he remained hesitant to talk with journalists about that time. “It’s such a cultural phenomenon, and there are few Black voices in ‘Star Wars,’ so I feel that I’m partially obliged to keep my voice out there,” he said.

Best is also a futurist and an adjunct lecturer who argues that his character “represents the possibility that whatever you got in your head, creatively, we can invent a future where this thing exists.”

Since those dark days, Best has diversified his ambitions. He’s an adjunct lecturer at the University of Southern California’s School of Dramatic Arts, where he teaches filmmaking for actors. At Stanford University’s d.school, he has taught a class revolving around Afrofuturism, a subject that informs his belief that an optimistic future is possible through the combination of narrative art and technology.

“Jar Jar represents the possibility that whatever you got in your head, creatively, we can invent a future where this thing exists,” he said. “Just because no one has done it before, doesn’t mean it can’t be done.”

Throughout the years, Jar Jar hasn’t entirely left Best’s life. The actor has voiced the character in video games and in animated shows like “Star Wars: The Clone Wars.”

“It’s big and it tends to overtake your life,” Best said. “The thoughts I’ve had were, ‘Who am I outside of this?’ Because as an artist, you don’t want to be locked into one thing.”

More recently, he’s rejoined the “Star Wars” universe in his own body, as the warrior teacher Kelleran Beq on the children’s show “Jedi Temple Challenge” and in an episode of “The Mandalorian.”

“This is going to sound really corny, please forgive me, but it felt like coming home,” Best said.
Despite the baggage, Best never stopped loving Jar Jar. When he meets fans — on the rare occasions that he agrees to appear at conventions — Best has noticed it’s usually young children, people with disabilities and those who have been ostracized who identify most with Jar Jar. “He’s misunderstood, but Jar Jar’s heart is so pure,” he said.

At the time of the backlash, Lucas assured Best that Jar Jar’s target audience — who were kids and for whom the character would become a fond childhood memory — would eventually come to his defense. “He was right,” Best said. “It’s a different story now.”

Witness the reception for Best in 2019 at “Star Wars” Celebration, an event dedicated to the franchise, when fans welcomed him with thunderous applause. “It really warmed my heart to see him get that,” Chiang recalled.
Heart comes up a lot when Best’s name is mentioned.

Dave Filoni, the chief creative officer of Lucasfilm and a writer on “The Mandalorian,” described him as “a unique talent, and no one can replicate what he brings through his performance as Jar Jar. There is comedy, but also a lot of heart.”

And Best takes solace in the role he’s played behind the scenes as well. He noted that the software developed through his work as Jar Jar became central to the creation of future C.G.I. characters.

“I’m in there,” Best said. “You can’t have Gollum without Jar Jar. You can’t have the Na’vi in ‘Avatar’ without Jar Jar. You can’t have Thanos or the Hulk without Jar Jar. I was the signal for the rest of this art form, and I’m proud of Jar Jar for that, and I’m proud to be a part of that. I’m in there!”

 

[Patine]

I was about to post it earlier but then deleted as i thought no one would be interested, here it is (i left out the pics).

JJ -

Well, than he certainly took more of a positive, retrospective view than Alec Guiness, Jake Lloyd, and even though he had never said it publicly, there were strong suspicions, Kenny Baker (that he felt perpetually mistreated by Anthony Daniels, and that his not appearing in Episode VII was more than just his declining health, according to a few knew him closely).

 

[Synobun]

Burned through Tales of the Empire in a couple days. Very strong but does get a little weaker at the end, which prevents me from giving it a 10. Worth a gander. Mostly only relevant for those who have seen the Clone Wars show, a single episode of Mandalorian, and Ahsoka. I mean, it's watchable without that context, but it matters more if you have it.

 

[Clubber Lang]

More Jar-Jar, Rebuild the Galaxy -