Does even part of you miss the future-shock lunacy of George Lucas’ Star Wars prequels, which is now so totally absent from the hyper-traditionalist, J.J.-Abrams-produced Star Wars movies? Then here’s some news you can use: There are new developments with Jar Jar Binks in the extended Star Wars literary universe. The infamous, yelping, pseudo-Jamaican Gungan goof is still kicking around in that knotty world, and in an extremely depressing way.
Mashable notes that Binks, after proving to be a predictably inept senator in Lucas’ greatest avant-garde masterpiece Attack of the Clones, has resurfaced in the newest Star Wars novel, Chuck Wendig’s Star Wars Aftermath: Empire’s End. Reduced to a sad, Pierrot-like street clown, Jar Jar re-introduces himself in a short dialogue with an orphaned “refugee boy” named Mapo. As the Gungan explains: “Jar Jar makin some uh-oh mistakens…Desa hisen Naboo tink I help the uh-oh Empire.” That is to say: He cheesed it with his old friends, and they think he’s a traitor.
If Jar Jar shaped your formative years even at all, perhaps it’s nice to know that the gangly fella is still at it in some capacity–even if he’s clad in rags and sticking his tongue out for tips in some dank alley, and only in an obscure Star Wars-adjacent novel that’s being published in 2017.
