Call It An Experiment

[krpalmer]

During my latest vacation, I noticed a book in the cruise ship's library about how to shape an "information diet." Thinking that might be useful to look at (even if I worried it might show me I spend too much time in aimless poking at lightweight sources), I opened up the book. In a first preliminary glance through it, though, all of a sudden I was staring at a disparaging reference to The Phantom Menace complete with a footnote where the author proclaimed that even though he didn't have the hard data, he could confidently assume Jar Jar Binks had wrecked the "childhood memories" of millions of fans. With a "bah" reaction at what had seemed a thoughtful work invoking what's become a faintly overdone code word, I snapped the book shut and put it back on the shelf (and did miss my chance to see if the author actually understood one point of the movie was that the political system wasn't working to resolve problems). It's annoying enough to have disparaging references to Star Wars pop up in online discussions about other things I'm interested in; I prefer not to run across them in books as well.

Still, it did touch on a topic I'd been contemplating before. I seem to have pretty much left behind any thought of identifying "personal issues" to demonstrate to someone stuck dwelling on their own dislikes about Star Wars I might also be called "critical," but I suppose I remember enough from 1999 to have the impression the frenzy over Jar Jar Binks, visceral dislike covering for sniffy movie page columns and the columns covering for the dislike, to have the feeling the negativity might not have become so vast and monstrous without his character as the lightning rod. That, though, always seems to encourage thoughts of just "deleting" him from the movie, encouraging dismissals of him as an irrelevant attempt to attract "the wrong kind of people."

All of a sudden, though, I did start wondering "so what if you imagined taking Han Solo out of the original Star Wars?" You might just say Luke and Obi-Wan were able to afford their own starship and fly it themselves or invoke a more cautious and nervous commercial captain, and brush off one bit of the final battle as "not absolutely necessary." There, of course, some could object that Han became more important in the following movies while Jar Jar's role got much smaller. Still, all analogies are inexact.

Comments

[lazypadawan.livejournal.com]

That author's a putz. But it's exactly what I was talking about with the insidious nature of PT bashing left unchecked and unabated, with fans bullied out of Star Wars fandom and Lucasfilm abandoning it in the field.