Yoda (Frank Oz) in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. Image Courtesy of Disney/Lucasfilm, StarWars.com Databank.
Star Wars: The Last Jedi has ended up becoming one of the most divisive Star Wars movies of all time. In fact, one could almost argue that The Last Jedi has divided fans in the same way that The Phantom Menace united them.
Say what you want about Jar Jar, but he’s a very good icebreaker at parties. But Star Wars: The Last Jedi has started something even Jar Jar couldn’t.
His existence might have spawned a website called jarjarmustdie.com to prevent his inclusion in future films, but he’s still widely accepted as a canonical character. CBR reports that The Last Jedi, however, has made some fans so angry that they have even started an online petition to have it removed from canon completely. Can we please introduce these people to fanfiction instead?
Starting a petition to remove a film you have problems with from canon is ridiculous, especially if you’re in the Star Wars fandom. Ever since 1999, we’ve had to live with things that should never have been written down, let alone acted out on screen by actors who deserve better, some of whom are actual Oscar-winners.
So why have they chosen now to start kicking off about what is canon? The Last Jedi, for all its supposed crimes, has absolutely nothing on what George Lucas came up with in the early 2000s. We’ll take Ahch-To’s fish nuns over Watto any day of the week.
Is it just that online petitions have made it easier for fans to show their displeasure? Or is it that some Star Wars fans are now so entitled they can’t handle seeing a film that doesn’t live up to their sky-high expectations?
Who knows? Perhaps we’re being too harsh. But if The Last Jedi, a genuinely good film that gave us what we needed if not what we wanted, is in danger of being removed from canon, we’ve got a few more things we’d like to go with it.
Namely, the prequels.
5. Qui-Gon Jinn’s comlink and shaving appliance
This one is niche but have we ever talked about the fact Qui-Gon Jinn’s comlink from The Phantom Menace is an insane bit of product placement for Gillette?
The Hush-98 comlink that the Jedi uses to contact Obi-Wan, create white noise to protect privacy and send Anakin’s blood data for analysis, was actually an adapted Gillette Sensor-Excel for Women and what’s worse, George Lucas didn’t seem to think we would notice.
It’s almost like Lucas forgot that women would go and see Star Wars. Why else would he include something so obviously from the real world in a film that’s meant to defy expectations? In the galaxy far, far away, even milk isn’t the same. Milk is blue, sunsets are binary and football is played by what Mashable calls “sentient buoys”. Comlinks apparently double up as leg shavers.
It might sound like a small thing, but hear us out. This echo of the real world is jarring. It takes you out of the Star Wars world, even just a little bit, and all because George Lucas didn’t consider that women in the audience would notice. It’s either that or just the fact that he didn’t care. He looked at that razor and thought “Hey, that’s the walkie-talkie we’re looking for”.
What an imagination. What a world.
Women watch Star Wars. It’s really weird seeing Qui-Gon speaking so directly into what we know is a razor. For one thing, we can’t stop worrying about his mustache.
So consider this petitioners who want to get The Last Jedi removed from canon. Can we erase the Hush-98 from Star Wars canon instead? It’s much more important.
4. Training for the ballet, Yoda?
Whilst we would ideally like to have included erasing Han Solo’s death from Star Wars history, we have to admit that that happened for a reason. Just because we love him doesn’t mean we should turn back the clock on one of the best plot twists and villain-making moments in cinematic history.
So instead we turn to this: Yoda’s flying abilities. In Attack of the Clones, we witness Yoda fly into battle against Count Dooku, in a display that thoroughly contradicts the doddery little Jedi we meet on Dagobah.
Of course, this could be put down to age, but Yoda is a few hundred years old already in Attack of the Clones. Plus we’re not actually sure Force powers diminish with age — all signs seem to point to them increasing, if anything.
So what it really comes down to is the whims of George Lucas. He wanted to make a fight scene with CGI leaps and dizzying somersaults, and cared more about that than he did continuity. But we weren’t as impressed as he wanted us to be. Our kingdom for a Yoda that can defeat Dooku without a random ballet display.
The other Yoda-related thing we’d like to remove from canon is CGI-Yoda. The Yoda we know and love from Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi is a puppet and as such, hasn’t aged even 30-odd years later. He feels very real. CGI-Yoda … not so much.
3. The death of Queen Amidala
As we’ve already said, there are plenty of deaths that we would like to erase from Star Wars canon but none more so that that of Padmé Amidala. Han’s death furthered the plot and was necessary to show us the extent of Ben Solo’s monstrosity. Padmé’s death did no such thing.
Whilst Anakin’s vision of her death was instrumental in his turn to the Dark Side, her actual death was not. He wanted to protect her in the same way he wanted to protect his mother, but that wasn’t the Jedi way. In teaching Anakin to repress his feelings, the Jedi showed him the path to the Dark Side. Padmé didn’t need to die, and she certainly didn’t need to die of a “broken heart”. George, please.
If it wasn’t enough that the death of the only lead woman in the prequels wasn’t actually necessary, it’s also another massive continuity issue. Leia says in Return of the Jedi that she remembers her mother. We know Leia is extraordinary but for a newborn baby to actually recall the face of someone — that is a rare gift.
Again, Lucas is lucky that in cases like this he can simply say “Eh, because The Force”. But to that we echo the immortal words of Han Solo: “That’s not how the Force works!”.
Could Padmé not have married Bail Organa instead? Could she not have faked her death, changed her name and let her past turn into distant memory as she became part of a new family on Alderaan? This would explain why Leia could remember her. It would also mean that we wouldn’t have to see yet another powerful woman die because of the terrible actions of a man.
Alas it wasn’t to be. Padmé Amidala, always in our hearts.
2. Watto is a bad idea
We’ve already talked a little about how terrible Jar Jar Binks is but we haven’t touched upon the racism. His inclusion in the series caused a furor even when the film first came out, with The Independent calling out the character’s “Caribbean patois that fans find inane and demeaning.” The Telegraph points to American scholar and race theorist, Patricia Williams, who “said that Jar Jar’s character was reminiscent of the archetypes portrayed by blackface minstrels.”
But Jar Jar isn’t the only racist character in Star Wars. Watto, the slave owner who owns Shmi and Anakin Skywalker, is mindbogglingly awful. As Bruce Gottlieb from Slate describes him, he is “the hook-nosed owner of the local parts shop — Watto — who also happens to have a thick Yiddish accent!” (emphasis his).
Gottlieb continues:
"Psychological manipulations that work on almost everyone fail with Watto — “Mind ticks don’ta work on me … only money! No,” he cries — and the heroes get what they want only through the bravery of a gifted slave boy (Anakin Skywalker). At the end of the desert planet sequence, Anakin is emancipated but separated from his mother, who still belongs to Watto. Even in a galaxy far away, the Jews are apparently behind the slave trade."
Did Lucas even consider how antisemitic this character would come across? It’s almost unbelievable.
Star Wars has made great strides recently to make the galaxy a more inclusive place, especially in Rogue One and The Last Jedi, and as such, there is no room for Watto or Jar Jar. So tell us, where’s the petition to get rid of these two from canon?
1. There is no excuse for Midichlorians
This one is just stupid. Give us one good reason Anakin Skywalker doesn’t have a father. There’s absolutely no need to have his existence explained as an immaculate conception caused by an abundance of magic cells. It’s just utterly bizarre, uninteresting, and unnecessary.
At this point, maybe the entire prequel series was unnecessary. It could have been so good but my goodness, the execution.
As Dork Side of the Force points out, midichlorians also appear in Madeline L’Engle’s novel A Wrinkle in Time. They are “cells inside living beings” and they are present in every Force user, according to The Phantom Menace at least.
But Dork Side of the Force also points to an article by Charlie Anders at io9 called “The Real Problem with Midichlorians”. The eponymous real problem is, yet again, continuity. They contradict everything we were already told about The Force.
In A New Hope, Obi Wan tells Luke that the Force is “an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together…. A Jedi can feel the force flowing through him.”
As Anders says, “midichlorians actually contradict this explanation. All of a sudden, instead of there being an energy field that “binds the galaxy together,” there are little microscopic life forms inside of the Jedi, allowing them to… do what?”
Quite.
However, George Lucas’ terrible memory notwithstanding, there’s still no good reason to not give Anakin a father. Could he not have been a Jedi who betrayed the code and slept with Shmi only to abandon her?
Would this not have been an interesting footnote in Anakin’s past, contrasting with his deep love of Padmé and yet another example of why the Jedi Code is unfair? Would it not explain Qui-Gon Jinn’s feeling of responsibility towards Anakin because he is a Jedi and he was abandoned by one?
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Disney, hire us to rewrite the prequels. We have so many ideas.