How much better would Star Wars have been if Jar-Jar had been killed off early on? Watching this new alternate cut of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace where Jar-Jar dies in one of his first scenes, we can only dream of how much better off that movie would’ve been, not to mention the next two.
The fantasy of killing Jar-Jar is sort of like the Star Wars equivalent of going back in time to kill Hitler. Where we think we’d be better off without him, but would we really? I mean sure, we wouldn’t have the Holocaust, but we also wouldn’t have that ultimate cautionary tale to warn us against Anti-Semitism and the totalitarian state. It’s the same with Hitler.
I’ve seen this video show up on a few sites calling it a “deleted scene.” Obviously, it’s fan made. Believe it or not, studios don’t spend years planning an all-CGI character and do all the pre-production and insane planning that goes into it just to say, “Hmm, but what if killed him off in the second scene instead?”
Which is a shame, because they should have. While Jar-Jar is awful as a key character, he works brilliantly as cannon fodder, a way to illustrate the dangers of the movie’s world. Sort of like that panhandler in Dredd 3D who showed up for two seconds and then got crushed by a giant door. Now just imagine that guy, but with his crushed body making Jar-Jar’s dumb whimpering sounds while it twitches. Delicious.
It’s funny to watch The Phantom Menace after not having seen it for a while. Sooooo much pointless CGI! The whole clip reminds me of a 13-year-old girl’s web page the day after she learns HTML, where the fonts are twelve different colors and there are blinking background icons exploding all over the page (basically, like the Simpsons episode where Homer starts a website). Hopefully we’ve learned that not every shot needs to be a giant alien landscape painting since then? Let’s go ahead and leave this all in 1999, along with Limp Bizkit’s popularity.