Officially, Disney is on a “hiatus” from Star Wars, or at least from the Star Wars movies. On TV, it’s a very different story. Disney is making a new season of The Mandalorian. It’s making a series about Cassian Andor, a character from Rogue One. It’s got a show about Obi-Wan Kenobi in the works. This is the most active hiatus in history.
And then there’s Star Wars: Jedi Temple Challenge, a game show where kids will go through a number of challenges to learn how to follow the code of the Jedi. The whole shebang will be hosted by Ahmed Best, who will be playing a mentor figure to the contestants. But Star Wars fans of a certain age know Best as the guy who did motion capture and voice work for Jar Jar Binks in 1999’s Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace.
Now, back in the day, Jar Jar was derided by fans as being a goofy, kiddy, possibly offensive addition to the Star Wars universe mostly there to create merchandising opportunities. But time heals all wounds, and some of the fans who were kids when the prequel movies came out grew up to love the clumsy Gungan. “George [Lucas] told me this years ago,” Best said to Jamie Stangroom during an interview. “He was like, ‘The kids who love Jar Jar are gonna be adults and they’re gonna love [him].’ And he was right. I talk to a lot of people who are just like, ‘Jar Jar made my childhood’ and I’m with that. One of the reasons I did Jedi Temple Challenge is because it was those kids [who] lifted me up. And now they’re adults and they have kids, and I wanna keep giving to the kids.”
Back then, one of the defenses of Jar Jar, and indeed of the The Phantom Menace in general, was that he was designed with kids in mind. The theory goes that older Star Wars fans who grew up on the original trilogy went in expecting something geared towards them and were disappointed when they got something more family-friendly. It sounds like Best holds to that idea. “[T]he new iterations are not really skewed towards kids, which is something that George never really wanted to do,” he said. “George was always about the kids, you know. And he would always say, like, ‘If you can get the kids, you have fans for the next 20 years.’ He was very much about kids. So this idea that the movies are for adults is a very new thing.”
By “the new iterations,” he’s talking about the most recent Star Wars trilogy, the one made after Lucas sold Lucasfilm to Disney for $4.05 billion. It sounds like Best thinks those movies went a little far afield of the spirit of the originals. “This is the thing I think Star Wars is falling short of now: there really isn’t very much to believe in anymore,” he said. “The lack of faith in the mythology is really the thing I find to be missing. We don’t talk about the Force anymore in the Star Wars movies. We’re really about lineage and legacy … and technology. But the thing that made Star Wars work was the Force. There were two sides: the light side and the dark side. But we all believed in the Force … That’s what worked in the Lucas-verse when it came to Star Wars.”
So with Jedi Temple Challenge, it brings back this idea that we all have levels of connection to the Force, and you can actually grow your connection to the Force and it can become stronger through these trials at this temple. All of those things that Yoda did with Luke Skywalker at Dagobah in the swamp, this is where it was first. It was in this temple. You got to get good here. And I dig that. I like that. It’s something that I think would be wonderful for kids. Because now there’s a path to this thing … Now there are actual steps you can take to being a strong Jedi. And it gives you belief and faith.
“There are a lot of things I think [are] missing from Star Wars nowadays, but a big part of it is folding into the mythology in a way where the mythology is the star, and being able to tell a story and get out of the way of it being Star Wars,” Best continued. It’s an interesting take, and one that I think some fans probably sympathize with following the polarizing receptions of both 2017’s The Last Jedi and 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker. Best attended a screening and afterparty for The Rise of Skywalker, and said that he could feel people were “kind of over it.” As someone who went through a similar backlash to The Phantom Menace decades ago, it likely felt all too familiar. “I was just like, ‘Oh, y’all, I know where you are now. I can feel where you are right now. I know this feeling.’”
Best, by the way, struggled for years with the hateful backlash he and Jar Jar got after The Phantom Menace — he’s been very open about considering suicide at one point. I feel for him. Nowadays, vitriolic backlashes against creatives happen all the time, particularly online — see the dogpiling on Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss following the final season of that show, or the abuse Rian Johnson endured after the release of The Last Jedi, or Outlander star Sam Heughan’s recent troubles, and on and on. At least we can see a pattern now. But when The Phantom Menace came out, no one had seen anything like that level of misplaced anger in pop culture. It couldn’t have been easy.
Happily, Best come out of the other side of it ready to get back into that galaxy far, far away. There’s no release date for Star Wars: Jedi Temple Challenge just yet, but it sounds like they’ve shot episodes, so hopefully they’ll turn up on Disney+ before the end of the year.
And beyond that, are there any truth to the rumors that Best could return as a wiser, more world-weary Jar Jar in Disney’s Obi-Wan Kenobi show, possibly with a beard now? “Not as far as I know,” Best said. “I think Jar Jar is something that LucasFilm is trying to move away from. I am not going to hold my breath for a Jar Jar cameo in Obi-Wan, but who knows?”
Yeah, but if he did come back, what kind of beard would he want? “I would love a big, lumberjack, enormous Paul Buynan Rastafarian huge-ass beard.”
Seconded.
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