“In the end, I’m very happy with it”: George Lucas names cinema’s greatest comic relief character
Few figures in cinema are as beloved and despised, often by the same people, as George Lucas.
On one hand, he created the original Star Wars trilogy, one of the most important and beloved film series of all time, on the other, he created the prequel trilogy, one of the most maligned and mocked film series of all time, and don’t even get me started on the sequels. Yes, he technically had nothing to do with them, but I still hold him at least partly responsible.
To illustrate this point, I’m afraid we’re going to have to talk about Jar Jar Binks, introduced in The Phantom Menace, the gangly Gungan (performed by a very unfortunate Ahmed Best) who was intended to be a kid-friendly addition to the galaxy far, far away.
To be fair, he achieved this goal; however, while younger audiences enjoyed this awkward amphibian, older ones couldn’t stand him. Anyone who’d been around to enjoy the previous films came down on poor Jar Jar like a ton of bricks, and he became emblematic of the series’ decline, suffering the most backlash to a major character since a young puppy called Scrappy-Doo burst onto the scene.
Lucas has ridden to the defence of his most derided creation on a number of occasions, with the multi-billionaire reiterating while speaking with Vanity Fair in 2008, that Jar Jar was a purely comic relief character and the harsh response he had received had been massively out of proportion. To illustrate his point, he brought up another character from a popular franchise that fans also love to hate.
“I know a lot of people who don’t like Joe Pesci in the Lethal Weapon movies,” he said, “I love Joe Pesci, I think he was a great asset to that movie, but he’s not a very likeable character. People don’t realise that things are done for a lot of different reasons. But, hey, in the end, I’m very happy with it, and that’s what I care about.”
Introduced in Lethal Weapon 2, Leo Getz is a key witness in an upcoming trial that Martin Riggs, played by Mel Gibson, and Roger Murtaugh, played by Danny Glover, must protect from assassination, but there’s just the problem that Leo is really, really annoying. Pesci hit his brief perfectly, portraying this small-time crook as big-headed, oblivious, and utterly unbearable for most of his time on screen, while his ultra-obnoxious catchphrase of saying “OK” over and over again quickly became a pop culture staple, for better or worse.
Despite getting on people’s nerves on an industrial scale, Pesci was brought back for the next two films in the Lethal Weapon series, with Getz serving as an important part of the franchise as Riggs or Murtaugh, even if critics still didn’t warm to him. He was nominated for a Razzie for his performance in Lethal Weapon 4, which would subsequently be his final major movie appearance for over a decade, and while there’s no proof that these two events are linked, it’s certainly an interesting coincidence.
In the years since we first met him, opinion on Jar Jar Binks has softened considerably, which was also the case for Leo Getz, wherein people realised the character was just fulfilling a role in the story. One of them did it without leaning on racial stereotypes, but that’s a discussion for another time.
