otc
Stylish Dinosaur
- Joined
- Aug 15, 2008
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I really don't know why I bother sometimes... my brief (re)review of The Phantom Menace is only two pages back: https://www.styleforum.net/threads/...ontain-spoilers.321243/page-358#post-10136768
The racism is not the product of some kind of weird imagination as @wojt would have you believe. It's not just Jar-Jar, who was such a disliked addition that Lucas abandoned his own plans for the character and reduced him to a bit part; it's his entire dim, sub-aquatic people. It's also the Trade Federation, who are pathetic, treacherous schemers, and talk like a racist stereotype of East Asian people (Chinese, Japanese, hard to tell - anyway, they all look the same, amirite?). It's also the avaricious, slave-owning Toydarian with his (wink-wink) huge proboscis, and not-at-all stereotype Jewish accent.
In short, just about any alien race of consequence in the film is a racial stereotype. It's a consequence at least partly of Lucas's decision to have them speak in English, instead of using subtitles for imaginary languages as in the original trilogy. No-one thinks Wookies or Jawas are racist stereotypes, right? Imagine if Lucas had had Chewbacca speak English with a 'hilarious' Jamaican accent or something... I'm pretty sure we wouldn't be thinking of Star Wars in the same way.
I haven't seen it 15 years, but I fondly remember a re-edit of the phantom menance that exploits this to pretty good effect.
They recut the audio on all of the alien races and use subtitles instead. Combine that with some deleted scenes and editing and they take the film to a much darker and better place.
The Phantom Edit - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org