Just one more thought I forgot to add:
I remember having dinner with a friend (who is a somewhat, moderately well known writer) about the character of Jar Jar Binks, and what could be done to “save him” as opposed to killing him off or forgetting about him. You have to remember that this was while the prequels were still going on, and we had no idea how it would all turn out.
My friend put forward the idea that Jar Jar was secretly evil, a swerve that she stole from Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series where it turns out that the goofy, deformed, cowardly court jester who accompanied the heroes all this time actually had been the evil galactic warlord known as the Mule, befriending the heroes in order to spy on them. This has become something of a popular theory online since then, incidentally - maybe because there are a lot of Asimov fans out there. The way she described it, at some point, Jar Jar would drop the pretense of being a fool and demonstrate formidable martial arts skills we never knew he had, kind of like “drunken boxing” where it looks deceptively like lurching clumsily around, and use those unpredictable movements to pound the stuffing out of the Jedi Knights like Jackie Chan in Drunken Master.
I had another idea, one I also stole.
My idea was, at some point in the third act of a Star Wars film, the fate of the galaxy was dependent on a suicide mission where the outcome was all but certain death – flying into a sun or something like that to stop a bomb, and whoever did it would pilot a ship knowing they would absolutely go to near-certain death. Anakin Skywalker, being noble, elects to go, but Jar Jar would stop him, saying, in a moment of rare dignity:
“No. I’ll pilot the shuttle, not you. You see, Padme loves you, and you love her. Obi-Wan is your friend. But me…nobody loves me at all. I don’t have any friends at all. People care if you live or die, but me…no one cares at all if I…” And he lets that thought hang.
If you play the moment right, everyone would see for a minute how lonely and kind of pathetic Jar Jar was, like Pagliacci. If you do it right, everyone in the theater would be crying…over Jar Jar Binks.
The next time we see Jar Jar, we’d see his frail, dead, lifeless burned out body, hugged by the characters. One of the female characters would weep into his chest and clothes. But at the last minute, a toe would move and he’d smile weakly. The audience would cheer – Jar Jar is alive! Cue the credits and the music.
From that point on, I think the audience would care about Jar Jar. Not sure if he could be used to sell candy and frisbees, but they’d care about him. If you have empathy, you can get people to like even Jar Jar.
