Fu Manchu on Naboo
Lucas is a visually sophisticated and careful moviemaker. In a TV interview, he said that he researched imagery of Satan in every known culture before deciding on how the evil warrior Darth Maul should look in the film (tattooed, with horns). A Star Wars book, The Visual Dictionary, that came out with movie describes in detail almost every image used in the film. So it's hard to believe that all the stereotyped imagery just happened.
One of the keys to Lucas's success is that his movies are made up of brilliantly re-imagined scenes from earlier films (World War II aerial dogfights, cowboys and Indians, swashbuckling sword fights, a Ben-Hur chariot race, etc.). After three very inventive Star Wars movies, the not-so-inventive fourth seems to have fallen back on some tired Hollywood ethnic themes he mostly avoided in the first three.
So The Phantom Menace offers us revived versions of some famous stereotypes. Jar Jar Binks as the dithery Prissy; Watto, a devious, child-owning wheeler-dealer, as the new Fagin; the two reptilian Neimoidian leaders as the inscrutably evil Fu Manchu and Dr. No. What's next--an interplanetary version of the Frito Bandito? The Star Wars films deserve better than this. Let's put all these characters to sleep and start over in the next movie.
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