Just a small example…check out the live action tag under “film” for more on SW. These guys are pretty even handed and make room for other thoughts on the subject.
The Sand People/Tusken Raiders in the original films come across as a violent caricature of desert-dwelling Bedouin-like groups, being low-tech, desert-dwelling nomads wearing robes and head coverings. Lucas apparently intended the species to resemble the depiction of American Indians in old Wild West movies through their violent behavior toward the more technologically advanced settlers. The females also wear papoose boards. Whether Lucas realized the Unfortunate Implications or not is anybody’s guess.
This kind of goes back to what’s been mentioned earlier. Lucas said he was going for a sci-fi abstraction of old Western cliches, yet tvtropes specifically refer to them as “Bedouin-like”. That kind of comes off as projecting to me. And the papoose boards goes back tow hat I said that it’s impossible to design stuff without borrowing from real-life. But then the question is; is it wrong to borrow something real for “bad guys” when you’ve borrowed plenty of ideas and concepts for “good” or neutral characters (like f.ex. the Mongolian influences on Amidala’s wardrobe).
The Star Wars prequel films also feature the Neimoidians - a race of slit-eyed, inscrutable, unscrupulous villain aliens who speak with a vague Asian accent, wear Qing dynasty robes and hats, and threaten the galaxy with their trade routes and mass production technology. Many English-speaking critics saw the race as a collection of Asian stereotypes.
“Qing dynasty robes” seems just as applicable to Amidala as it does the Neimoidians.
(Though this female Neimodian from the EU definitely went for an obvious Qing dynasty vibe, though this would have been after the movie.)
Many critics accused Jar Jar Binks of resembling black caricatures in minstrel shows and early American cinema, highlighting his broken English, clumsiness, naivety and shuffling gait, all typical traits of minstrel characters. Physically, he has large nostrils and his “lips” make up half of his face, both traits commonly exaggerated in black caricatures. The Gungan accent, which sounds vaguely Caribbean, doesn’t help the issue, and his large floppy ears have been compared to dreadlocks. Jar-Jar’s first lines in the series, “Me-sa your humble servant,” call slavery and domestic servitude to mind. The character was voiced and motion-captured by black actor Ahmed Best, who denied any attempt to make Jar Jar a black caricature. The Gungan race as a whole, however, does not embody the trope;…
“he has large nostrils and his “lips” make up half of his face, both traits commonly exaggerated in black caricatures”. I’m not disagreeing with that statement in and of itself, but Jar Jar is after all an amphibian creature. In early concept art he has even less human-like features than what he does in the finished movie. And the whole “servant” thing is taken out of context. He’s essentially a clumsy, comic-relief version of Chewbacca, which had a life-debt to Han for saving his life.
I wonder; if Jar Jar had been played by another actor, yet had still been written the same, had the same broken-English dialogue, and the other Gungans still behaved exactly the same, would people then have drawn parallels between black caricatures and his lips, nostrils, floppy ears, etc.?