Cut Twice

I watched Episode I in theaters and felt it the moment he appeared on screen. This was wrong. This character wasn’t landing. Everyone around me felt it too, this collective discomfort at what was supposed to be the comic relief of a Star Wars film.

Jar Jar Binks became one of cinema’s most reviled characters, the kind of thing fans cut out of their own viewing experience, edit out of their own memories if they could. The running joke was simple: why is this character allowed to exist?

Turns out someone almost didn’t allow it. A deleted scene shows him dying in Episode I, a moment someone at Lucasfilm shot and considered keeping. But it was part of a larger scene that got cut, so it disappeared twice—the death scene and the scene containing it, both gone.

Lucas filmed his solution to the Jar Jar problem and threw it away. Left him in the movie anyway, let him survive to the end of the trilogy and beyond. Maybe he didn’t want to draw attention to the problem by actually killing him off. Or maybe he just liked the cut better without. Either way, Jar Jar got to be despised without being allowed to exit gracefully. Just stuck there for the whole run.