Many people who saw The Phantom Menace left with a burning desire to murder Jar Jar Binks, but of all those millions, only J.J. Abrams was eventually in a position to be able to do something about it. As he was preparing The Force Awakens, Abrams recalled to Vanity Fair, he did think about throwing in the corpse of the hated Gungan, possibly alongside that crashed Star Destroyer. “I have a thought about putting Jar Jar Binks’s bones in the desert there,” he told the mag. “I’m serious! Only three people will notice, but they’ll love it.” Abrams eventually decided that this kind of fan service, while hilarious, might ruin the movie. It’s a “constant struggle,” he said, “to make sure that none of these things are treated like either they’re a museum piece and we’re trying to honor them, or they’re gratuitous and thrown in because, well, it’s a Star Wars movie, so you’ve got to put these things in. Everything has got to be essential to the characters in the film.” In other words, it was Jar Jar’s essential inessentialness that ended up saving his life.
