MUSIC IN
ROB:
I was kind of overwhelmed because, uh,Men in Black had been 200 shots, this was now gonna be 2000 shots. I had 10 animators on Men in Black, now I was gonna need 65 animators on Phantom Menace. It was an enormous…
DYLAN:
A huge undertaking.
ROB:
A huge undertaking and I started to really panic about it!
This is Rob Coleman. He was the animation director on the Star Wars prequels. Which means he was the guy tasked with transforming Ahmed Best into Jar Jar Binks.
ROB:
Truthfully, I didn’t know if we could pull it off. It's a tall task to put a, an animated character into a live action movie, standing—”standing,” he says, in quotation marks—next to Liam Neeson and Ewan McGregor and Natalie Portman, who are naturally alive and engaging and amazing at their craft. And for our audience members, there's a little lizard voice in the back going, “is it real? Is it real? Is it real? Does it– Do I believe in it? Am I engaged in it?”
MUSIC OUT
DYLAN:
This tall task ended up becoming so tall that Rob took it to the boss.
ROB:
I asked to have a meeting with George up at Skywalker Ranch and I went in and, and he said, “so what's the– I hear you that you have a problem.” “Yeah,” I said. “My problem, my problem is that the world has been waiting for this movie since 1983 and I, uh, I don't know if I can do it.”
DYLAN:
Feeling the pressure, Rob got to work. Now, Plan A for Jar Jar Binks was to blend a CGI head with a bodysuit that Ahmed wore on set. But Plan A was not working.
ROB:
It never fit perfectly. It always slid, and we're talking pixels but the human eye is really good at picking up those kind of problems. And it never worked.
DYLAN:
Rob needed a Plan B.
MUSIC IN
ROB:
So it was Jeff Light at ILM who came to me and said, “you know, we have this new technology called motion capture, and we could record Ahmed and absolutely apply his movement and attach it to the digital Jar Jar.”
DYLAN:
So, that’s exactly what they did. In a test, Rob had one of his senior animators match exactly what Ahmed was doing. And then Rob took that test to George Lucas.
ROB:
And it was there that he realized, “we can match Ahmed. Look! Our animators are really gifted. We can do this.” So it removed that technical problem and it sent us down the motion capture route. From day one I could see the, the incredible advantage this was gonna give us and that it was going to honor George's request that it be Ahmed’s performance that drove this character. It wasn't gonna be invented by a bunch of animators, that he had cast Ahmed because he loved his physicality and his sense of timing and all of that.
DYLAN:
Which meant that Rob worked very closely with Ahmed.
ROB:
He was a young, super energetic, really enthusiastic man. It was, his energy was… just astounding to me. I actually felt that we worked incredibly well together cuz we complimented each other in the, in what we brought to the character, um, that neither one of us could do the character without the other one.
THEME IN
DYLAN:
So Rob and his team of animators devoted themselves to making Jar Jar a reality. And by the time the film was set to debut Rob was feeling like the Whitney Houston to Brandy’s Cinderella, which is to say: he made the impossible possible.
ROB:
I had lived in this amazing and nervous bubble of helping George Lucas bring these characters to life. And I had lived in that world where I was 100% focused on giving him the performance he wanted. And I knew by the end of that movie that we had achieved that. So I was on cloud nine as we went to New York City.
DYLAN:
Rob was on his way to New York to attend the Big Apple Premiere of The Phantom Menace, where he was also set to do some press for the movie.
ROB:
And I will never forget I was sitting in a hotel room being interviewed by Rolling Stone—I'm actually getting goosebumps—it was only then that I, it started to dawn on me that Jar Jar was not necessarily going to be the most popular character.
DYLAN:
Rob and Ahmed had the benefit of building Jar Jar Binks in a protected creative bubble.
Today, we’re going to take a look at what happened when that bubble burst in 1999. We’ll see how the backlash against the character became chatter on the early internet, we’ll see how, and why, that chatter was picked up by traditional media, and, eventually, we will also see how it jumped from targeting the character to Ahmed himself.
THEME OUT
Welcome back to The Redemption of Jar Jar Binks. I’m Dylan Marron.
[AD BREAK]
ROB:
So as the day went on I started to have a lump in my stomach cuz I was like, “oh my goodness.”
DYLAN:
Feeling a bit deflated, Rob finished up press in New York, and headed back to the west coast.
ROB:
And then I was fortunate enough to be asked to fly back with George on his jet.
DYLAN:
Okay, brag.
ROB:
And so we took off from New York and we're flying back to California and I was sitting up front and I was kind of feeling, I don't know, confused.
MUSIC IN
ROB:
Someone in PR had given him—back then, it's 1999, there's no iPad. It's a stack, it's a ream, 500 pages is what it looked like—of all the printed reviews for the films. And I was watching George go through them…
DYLAN:
The reviews were overall not great. And a number of them did reference Jar Jar specifically. One reviewer from Variety described Jar Jar as quote “a poor cousin to Eddie Murphy’s dragon in ‘Mulan.’” End quote.
MUSIC OUT
Now, Jar Jar was not the only issue that the critics had with The Phantom Menace, but still as Rob watched George flip through that stack of reviews, he was concerned.
ROB:
Over a couple hours he read everything and then he looked up and he, he waved me over and he said, “you, you don't look very happy.” And I said, “well, I just, I'm, I've seen some of the reviews and, and I just thought we'd created something amazing.” And he said, uh, he said, “did any of the reviews say that he didn't look real?” I said, “uh, no.” “Did any of the reviews say that he didn't feel like he was in the scene?” I said, “no.” He said, “did, did all the reviews actually treat him like he was an actor in the movie?” I said, “uh, yeah, they did.” He said, “well then you did your job, didn't you? Because they just don't like him as a character. That's got nothing to do with the work that you did. You should be happy with these reviews because they treated your character like he was real.” I'm like, “Ok, thanks George! Appreciate that!”
MUSIC IN
DYLAN:
I mean don’t get me wrong, this was very nice of George Lucas. But the criticism was still in the air and it surprised Rob.
ROB:
It had never dawned on me, cuz I lived in that bubble, as I said, where I was working with a man who wanted it. I'd worked with this incredibly generous actor who had given everything into the performance.
DYLAN:
The actor he’s talking about here is, of course, Ahmed, who had lived inside this same magical, creative bubble. And he too was anxiously awaiting the film’s release.
When the movie had its premiere, how were you feeling?
AHMED:
It was very complex. I caught wind of the media take very early on and I kind of just, like, laughed it off and the idea was, well, when the public sees it, all of that shit is gonna go away.
MUSIC OUT
DYLAN:
The bad reviews were one thing. But Ahmed was also plugged in to a different avenue for criticism.
SFX: MODEM
AHMED:
I was, to this day, still very much technology forward. Right?
DYLAN:
Yeah.
MUSIC IN
To put it in today’s terms, Ahmed was Very Online.
AHMED:
Right. So I had computers, I had a website.
DYLAN:
Mm-hmm.
AHMED:
I was on the web, I was in chat rooms. I, I was, I was very web savvy at a, at a very young age. I was an early adopter.
Now, public backlash is this incredibly real but also totally intangible thing. So I wanted to know how these negative online reactions were reaching Ahmed in 1999.
MUSIC OUT / MUSIC IN
DYLAN:
You're not trending on Twitter. This is Web 1.0. So how is this reaching you?
AHMED:
So I saw the websites occur in real time. You know, putting pictures of Jar Jar's severed head and my severed head next to it on websites. Really, really hateful things.
MUSIC OUT
ETHAN:
One of the first things to say is that the internet and science fiction literally go hand in hand.
DYLAN:
This is Ethan Zuckerman. He’s an early architect of the internet. And his resume is so long and so distinguished that if I told you about every impressive thing he’s done, you’d think this was a podcast about him.
I think of him as an internet scholar, an internet wizard, but it’s probably best to let him define himself on his own terms.
ETHAN:
I, I think these days I think of myself as an internet gray beard.
DYLAN:
(laughs)
ETHAN:
Um, I have literally grown the gray beard to sort of grow into it.
DYLAN:
Yeah, seriously.
ETHAN:
Although I'm a, I'm a gray beard who's very concerned with the future of the internet. And a lot of my work today is around trying to build internet communities, uh, that are more constructive and less hateful, uh, which leaves you and me working on some of the same issues.
DYLAN:
I’ve known Ethan for a few years now, and I figured he would be the perfect person to help me (let’s be real: us) make sense of this unique moment in Internet history that Ahmed was finding himself in.
MUSIC IN
ETHAN:
So I think maybe the first thing to say about the internet in ‘99 is that it crosses a really interesting demographic mark. By November of 1999, there is an estimated hundred million US citizens online. It's one of the biggest years of the Internet's expansion. The internet is here. It's a big thing. It's new, it's cool. It's being hyped. Behind the scenes, there's a really interesting transition going on.
MUSIC OUT
DYLAN:
This is a transition from the few to the many. From the original architects of the internet to its new tenants. In other words: the normies were infiltrating. And if you don’t know what “normie” is, I’m so sorry but that means that you are one. (And just to be clear, for writing a sentence like that, I am too.)
MUSIC IN
All you need to know is that 1999 is a tipping point.
ETHAN:
And so there's a little bit of a cultural collision of the folks who've largely been involved with building this new, more accessible internet. And you have this new hundred million people in the US saying, “oh, this is really interesting. And you mean that I can contribute to this? I can have my say? I, I suspect I have things to say.”
And the way these millions of users are saying these things is on message boards, in Usenet groups, in forums. But one of the loudest ways to be heard on the internet was through domain names.
MUSIC OUT
ETHAN:
People are putting up simple websites. And people who have a wacky or strange idea are sometimes just taking their own little corner of the internet and putting it out for people to stumble on. And many of those webpages are fan pages. Uh, and they might also be anti fan pages. But they are something that someone is passionate about.
A beat.
There was a whole culture around the blank sucks domain. So if you had a bad experience with National Rent-a-Car, you could go out and register National Rent-a-Car Sucks dot com, And it got to the point where brands were being advised to buy their sucks domains.
DYLAN:
As you may have already guessed, we’re including this because there was, indeed, a Jar Jar Sucks dot com.
It’s no longer easy to find but my producer Amy found it on The Wayback Machine .
MUSIC IN
So, like two neighborhood teens in a coming-of-age action-adventure movie, we pack our proverbial backpacks and push open the door.
SFX: WIND & DOOR CREAKS OPEN
AMY:
Um, so it's a pretty bare bones site. It is what it looks like…
DYLAN:
Seemingly untouched since it was last altered at the turn of the millennium, there’s a very late-90s ad hanging over the entryway.
AMY:
It's the Penthouse ad, the banner “jar jar sucks dot com” with a photo of Jar Jar's head.
DYLAN:
With, uh, accentuated eyes.
AMY:
Mm-hmm. And they have him saying … something unkind.
DYLAN:
As we tiptoe through this old relic, it’s as if we’re seeing a digital manifestation of that lump in Rob’s stomach, the tangible version of those complex feelings that Ahmed felt after the movie premiered.
We’re exploring an old, abandoned haunted house. In the foyer—god I always feel rich and unhinged when I say it that way— in the foyer, we’re greeted with a menu. In all its grainy glory.
AMY:
So I was excited to find the website and then slightly terrified to click on these links and see where they go.
DYLAN:
This menu has five buttons: Truth, Jar Jar Defenders, Gallery, Multimedia, and Links. The “Gallery” button has added text that says “New 18 and Over Gallery Added.” Which is… I’m assuming Jar Jar porn? Now, I am not one to kink shame, but Amy and I choose not to go into that room. Amy scrolls down the page.
AMY:
And then you, you can kind of see, like, an apology at the bottom.
DYLAN:
Um, “and please pardon the sloppy design. I only have 5.05 minutes a day to work on this, so cut me some slack! This web portal is brought to you by the SFTBOSMP, the Society for the Betterment of Stupid Movie Puppets. For more information on how you can make a difference, please email admin at jar jar sucks dot com.” Interesting.
MUSIC OUT
DYLAN:
We click that first button, the one labeled “Truth” where we find notes from visitors.
AMY:
And I can pull a couple of these that I think that you should look at. Um, so yeah, start with this “Dear Sir or Madam.”
DYLAN:
“Dear Sir or Madam, after seeing the Phantom Menace I searched the internet for anti Jar Jar webpages. After 15 seconds, I found you. Thank you.” Huh. “Can't wait for you to add more content to your site. Jar Jar absolutely ruined the movie for me. I'll be cheering the hardest in episode two if the first scene consists of his whole race getting annihilated. Jeff.” Oh my God. He's talking, I hope, about the Gungan race.
Amy and I take a look at five more notes. And these notes offer a window into the sort of community that’s being built around hating Jar Jar.
MUSIC IN
They express parallel thought…
DYLAN:
“Just today we were talking about registering Jar Jar Binks sucks.com…”
Solidarity…
“Thank God myself and my friends aren't the only ones. The Gungan themselves were no problem. But Jar Jar. Man oh man. Please hurt him plenty.”
Hyperbole…
“May your page serve as a safe haven for those unfortunate souls who can no longer be productive members of society due to the damage inflicted by having to sit through the myriad of Jar-Jarring scenes in _The Phantom Menac_e. Thanks again Matt”
Proposals… ?
“What we want to do is make Jar Jar death movies”
And even confessions…
“Hi. If Jar Jar Binks were drowning, I would throw him a stone.”
MUSIC OUT
Just want to say two things about these notes:
One, there’s something deeply familiar about them. The hyperbolic way a lot of these writers were expressing themselves is exactly how we see people exaggerate online today.
You don’t just “not like” someone, you want to accelerate their drowning.
You aren’t simply “bothered” by something, that something affects your ability to be a productive member of society.
Now, the second thing to say about these letters, is that it shows you just how much people were communicating through websites. I mean, many of these people are expressing that they came across this page by searching. Some are even claiming that they had the idea first.
MUSIC IN
To be honest, walking through this abandoned site feels a little eerie. Some of it is clearly written as a “joke” —heavy quotes around joke— but compiled together it starts to become genuinely a little spooky.
Amy navigates us to a new page.
AMY:
So, this is the gallery.
DYLAN:
Mm.
AMY:
This is like early memes!
DYLAN:
Amy’s right. This would be instantly recognizable today.
DYLAN:
Jar in front of the atomic bomb. Jar Jar with his head exploded. Jar Jar being stabbed by three Samurai swords?
AMY:
And I think getting an injection.
DYLAN:
Uh, kill Jar Jar Banks as a kind of, like, merch box, “a game we would like to see.” Um, Liam Neeson mourning over a dead Jar Jar Binks.
AMY:
I mean this is pretty graphic.
DYLAN:
“Top 10 ways we wish Jar Jar Binks had died in The Phantom Menace.” God, that's so – this is so dark.
Amy and I, still in up-to-no-good neighborhood teen mode, aren’t done exploring.
MUSIC OUT
That’s in just a minute.
[AD BREAK]
We are back. So in addition to Jar Jar Sucks.com, there were actually quite a few other anti-Jar Jar websites. And these were the kinds of websites Ahmed was encountering. There was Jar Jar Binks Must Die dot Com. The Jar Jar Hate webpage. You get the idea. They popped up within days of the film’s release.
MUSIC IN
Ethan alerted me to another webpage that he found.
ETHAN:
I was able to find the Kill Jar Jar Binks Now Webpage.
DYLAN:
God bless.
ETHAN:
And what I thought was so interesting about it is that this piece is part of a Jar Jar Binks hate web ring.
To extend the metaphor, Jar Jar Sucks dot com was a lone haunted house. The Jar Jar Binks Hate Web ring, though, creates a sort of haunted housing development.
MUSIC OUT
ETHAN:
Web rings were a way to navigate from one personal homepage to another. And it was this idea that if you wanted to talk about Star Wars and someone else wanted to talk about Star Wars, you could link your pages together and you could navigate from one to the next of them. But what this suggests to me is in 1999, there were enough people posting Jar Jar Binks hate websites to have a Jar Jar Binks hate web ring, which really does sound like kind of a very specific sub-community in all of this.
DYLAN:
Amy and I poke around the Kill Jar Jar Binks Now page that’s in this new sub-community.
SFX: WIND & A DOOR OPENING
Greeting us as we enter is a sort of mission statement.
AMY:
He says “if Jar Jar was in a Disney movie, which jokes on you, it's now a Disney movie, "where he should have been–”
DYLAN:
(laughs) Yeah.
AMY:
“I would've had absolutely no problem with him. Just like, I might not like Big Bird, but I have no desire to kill him, nor do I hate him for anything. BUT,” in all caps, “Jar Jar was a character that was in a movie that I have waited forever for and was TOTALLY unnecessary comic relief. He was a child's character and his slapstick, immature antics didn't belong in Star Wars.”
DYLAN:
This was the common refrain of many of these complaints: that Jar Jar is a kid’s character in what they wanted to be a grownup movie.
AMY:
“Also, just because I have a webpage called Kill Jar Jar Binks now doesn't mean if I saw Jar Jar Binks on the street one day, I would find the first sharp object I could find and assault him. I just dislike him and decided to make a humorous webpage about it. It's funny. Laugh a little, and if you don't find it funny, move on…”
DYLAN:
This feels incredibly recognizable, this act of self protection by calling everything “just a joke.” There’s almost no comeback to this. If you’re offended, you’re part of the problem. You’re a pearl-clutching normie who needs to lighten up.
Anyway, off my soapbox: Amy and I keep clicking around.
MUSIC IN
AMY:
I mean he's saying even though I have a webpage called Kill Jar Jar Binks now doesn't mean I would harm him, but then [Amy gasps]
DYLAN:
Ok here is why Amy just gasped. As Amy was talking, she left her mouse hovering over the link that reads “Kill Him Now.” And you know how when you hover your cursor over a hyperlink, there’s a box of alt text that appears?
Well, an alt text box has just appeared: and it reads “Kill the Homo Fuck Right now. Don’t delay.”
MUSIC OUT
It's worth noting that this was a read that some people had of Jar Jar: that the character was gay. It’s something Ahmed was even asked about directly. It's hard to tell, though, if this piece of alt text is a reference to that read or if it's true homophobia from the website's creator, or just that good old fashioned atmospheric homophobia that hung like a cloud for many of us in the 90s. The cloud that taught us "gay" and "bad" and “annoying” were all synonyms. The cloud that deluded us into thinking gay jokes were truly funny. Jokes that some of us laughed along with, sometimes even the loudest, so that that terrifying eye of suspicion would never fall on us.
It's gonna sound so sad, but just know that I'm totally okay and I'm really glad that we saw this, but I think there's something like seeing that kind of language in that kind of font, because the font is all preserved, no one has updated these pages, you know?
AMY:
Mm-hmm.
DYLAN:
Um, it, it doesn't have, it's, it's like none of these are designed by Squarespace.
AMY:
(laughs)
DYLAN:
You know, they're like, they're all basic HTML that was probably coded by the person who made the website, who knows a thing or two about HTML. And there was something so dark about seeing it because it's like, I remember websites like these that were like, of the time. And I remember just like this, like darkness, I would feel as I was like this closeted kid sifting through these websites, navigating past a minefield of gay slurs and gay jokes, or like almost gay slurs, like “homo fuck,” you know? And it's, um, it like hurts to see… I'm sharing this all out loud, I guess, because if I feel this way, I cannot imagine what Ahmed felt as he was sifting through this, like, new digital public square.
MUSIC IN
AHMED:
This was coming directly at me.
DYLAN:
Star Wars fans-turned-Jar Jar haters seemed to be upset at Ahmed for a number of reasons…
AHMED:
… Ruining their childhood, ruining their fantasies, ruining Star Wars. You know, they really believed in —or believe in— this force, this religion, you know? I think that's one of the brilliance of George Lucas. He really turned Star Wars into a religion.
DYLAN:
Right.
AHMED:
Which is why it's so ubiquitous.
DYLAN:
Yeah.
AHMED:
And loved by so many people. But people really take that personally.
DYLAN:
Right.
AHMED:
And so they blamed me for that. Me.
MUSIC OUT
DYLAN:
They blamed him in forums and on websites online, but their animosity soon outgrew their digital containers.
AHMED:
When things break on the internet, it doesn't really tip until traditional media grabs a hold of it and 10Xs it. Right? I think going viral and just having it stay in the ecosystem of the internet is a misnomer.
DYLAN:
Mm-hmm.
AHMED:
Um, at that time, because websites were the new thing, the hot thing, traditional media picked up what was going on and just ran it.
MUSIC IN
DYLAN:
Hating Jar Jar Binks was becoming a story. Our resident internet graybeard, Ethan? He actually pointed this out to me, too.
ETHAN:
I went back and did some of the reading of what people were writing about Jar Jar in 1999, and there's a pattern that will feel very, very familiar to you. Which is that it's someone in CNNorin_Time Magazine_ or_Salon_ writing and saying “the internet is upset about.” And then they will quote a couple people on the internet and then they will build out the critique. They will bring in an academic to it. And essentially this ping pong between these online spaces and these traditional media spaces, which we are so familiar with right now, is firmly in place in 1999.
MUSIC OUT
DYLAN:
These stories have headlines like “Jar Jar Is No Star Star” and “Computer Age Speeds Backlash” and “Jar Jar Jars Viewers”. These are actual headlines that ran in newspapers across the country, and in outlets like CNN. And these stories, they collate the hate. I can only think to call them “hate aggregators.” Because they collect the websites, the takes, and even the very worst snippets from the reviews, and they present them to the reader as if they’re reporting on a worldwide phenomenon.
MUSIC IN
ETHAN:
So this idea that the internet, and sort of internet hate, legitimates a topic of conversation. The Internet is saying it, therefore we as serious people can talk about it. It might not make sense to say we're gonna write a think piece about Jar Jar Binks, but when we can hang it on Jar Jar Binks Die Die Die dot com, suddenly it becomes legitimate. And that pattern plays out today. It was fascinating to look back and, and see it in place almost 25 years ago.
DYLAN:
And this is when it clicks for me: this is precisely how this anti-Jar Jar sentiment gained momentum.
The reviews were not great, sure, but that was just a piece of it. Meanwhile, online, hating Jar Jar Binks was becoming a trend. And then when that trend was reported on by traditional media, and mixed in with snippets of those bad reviews, it became a capital-S Story.
MUSIC OUT
It’s a story that we can all recognize today, but it was completely novel in 1999.
ETHAN:
I think there is the possibility that The Phantom Menace is a singularity of some sort. That the sheer density of attention and hype sort of create something that is both a point of gravity and sort of mainstream culture and a point of gravity and internet culture. And because it's such a powerful gravitational attractor, these two worlds, which really don't have much to do with one another, end up colliding because they're attracted to the black hole that is The Phantom Menace. And it just crystallizes in Jar Jar. And then in this case, it crystallizes around a human who did not have any reason to suspect that he personally would end up sort of this object of this hatred.
MUSIC IN
DYLAN:
This digital hate campaign against Jar Jar, it was spilling into the physical realm for Ahmed in other, more dangerous ways too.
AHMED:
I started getting, um, death threats, phone calls, um…
DYLAN:
Just directly? They found your number?
AHMED:
Directly. My number was leaked onto the internet, and, um, people would call my number and threatened…
DYLAN:
Mm-hmm.
AHMED:
… my death. To which, I, I just couldn't really fathom that, you know what I'm saying? I just didn't know how to handle that. Like this is a character I played. You know?
DYLAN:
But if you can believe it, that was only part of the story…
Well, I was thinking that you just share with me all of the articles you found.
AMY:
Uh, this is from Salon. The headline is “Star Wars Lovers…” (reading begins to overlap) / I found a lot of coverage in The Los Angeles Times / “A Galaxy Far, Far Off Racial Mark” / “Star Wars & Stereotypes. Is Jar Jar Binks a Racist Character?” / This was syndicated in a lot of…
AISHA HARRIS:
There's this sense that Star Wars has not been kind to its non-white characters. And it feels in many ways, kind of stuck in the past.
AHMED:
So the death threats were one thing, the websites were another thing. It wasn't until it reached my neighborhood that I was-- I, I didn't wanna leave my apartment. That was the hardest part.
That “hardest part” is next time.
MUSIC OUT / THEME IN
The Redemption of Jar Jar Binks is a part of the TED Audio Collective. It’s produced by Amy Gaines McQuade, Jacob Smith, and me, Dylan Marron. Our editors are Banban Cheng and Michelle Quint. Additional editing by Jimmy Gutierrez and Alejandra Salazar . Production support from Roxanne Hai Lash. Mastering by Ben Tolliday, who also made our theme with help from Jason Gambrell. Additional production help from Nisha Venkat. Fact checking by Kate Williams with Julia Dickerson. Special thanks to Gretta Cohn and Dan O'Donnell.
THEME OUT