OK, this was kind of long and rant-y, but what I’m trying to say is that the PT accents are such a vague hodgepodge of sounds that I fail to see how they can represent any specific language in an intentional and “insensitive” manner.
And yet…I do see it and hear it. So do many others who have made their thoughts known all over the internet.
I get that. And I get that these characters can be very uncomfortable to people. But the fact that people seem to hear different things I think is very important and telling. What you hear isn’t necessarily heard by others, and where you hear Creole, some hear Indian, and so forth. I even found a forum post from 2002 where someone said that Watto’s hat made him look French.
I understand you and Dre quite well and really do see your side of this debate. I also can appreciate how something vague can be interpreted in many different ways. That being said, enough of us have noticed this since the TPM and the rest of the PT first showed. I haven’t talked about it in years and only brought it up here because someone else had mentioned it. In my recent trip online I have found a lot more people actually think as I do and explain it better than I have.
Some I disagree with. I agree with you that most of the trade delegation don’t sound Asian. Gunray sounds like a really bad Charlie Chan imitation…yes, it’s that bad to my ears.
Really? This guy? I don’t see how he even even barely resembles Gunray. The voice is wrong, the intonations are completely different, and Gunray actually does the grammar properly whereas Chan skips entire words.
I don’t think Jar Jar is this quintessential black sounding and acting character but he has definite attributes that are cringe worthy. The worst by far for me in Watto. They doubled down on his image in the second film and added a Hasidic hat and beard. He sounds JUST like an old Jewish caricature. There is NO way that someone at LA could have looked at Watto in AOTC and not seen that…no way. Does that mean I think it was meant to be racist? No but definitely insensitive or unthinking.
I will say that out of the alternatives you suggest I agree the most with “unthinking”, because I honestly don’t think it crossed any of their minds. At least not the LucasFilm people.
The thing about Watto’s hat though, which was in the TPM storyboards BTW, looks like it’s supposed to be a droid-part or something similar. It looks very much like the pit-droid heads and in the storyboards it even had an antennae sticking out of it. And the rest of Watto’s design really isn’t that illogical from an alien-design perspective. First of all Lucas originally described him (as I recall) as a Tapir with Humming Bird wings and Duck feet. Naturally as a character with a lot of dialogue and personality he had to have somewhat human features; so his face (minus the trunk) is fairly human like. His human-like eyes had to convey a large range of emotions and it helped sell the CGI as a living being. And since he was supposed to be somewhat shabby-looking character they gave him some stubble and a bit of a gut. In AOTC he’s had to sell his last slave and it seems like he’s kind of down on his luck. To show this they’ve given him a shabby beard and what appears to be a re-purposed mechanical part as a hat. Also keep in mind that he’s an amphibian living in the desert. Now did much of this end up giving him a somewhat Hasidic look? I guess? But from Lucas and the designers POV it’s not hard to see why they only saw a weird hovering amphibian with a metal-hat, which is also what a lot of people watching the film simply saw.
Anyway, I’m making way too long a post again.