#star wars: the phantom menace

[milkcioccolato]

How the phantom menace should have gone, imo😌

[livs-cooke]

Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. I sense much fear in you.

STAR WARS: EPISODE I – THE PHANTOM MENACE (1999) dir. George Lucas

[valyrianpoem]

Natalie Portman as PADME AMIDALA [4/?] Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999)

[alphamecha-mkii]

Star Wars: The Phantom Menace - Droid Starfighter Concept Art by Doug Chiang

[haaaaaaaaaaaave-you-met-ted]

Star Wars: The Phantom Menace - Gungan Meeting Concept Art by Doug Chiang

[hanasnx]

indy… do you have a playlist for our fave slut, anakin? what kinda music would u smash to with him/ would he smash with ?

hi there sweet thing. i loved this inbox bcos music is so important to me and i have several anakin/anakin-related playlists that i love to share even though theyre not organized yet

@kraytjustkrayt made me a playlist with this exact premise! i havent gotten a chance to give my full review of it including the songs i think he'd listen to during sex (the post is in my drafts)

as for regular playlists, here are my non-finalized playlists for him (they are always updating and being added to):

anakin skywalker + darth vader master playlist (400+ songs) anakin skywalker albums anakin skywalker + muse tcw!anakin

related. —

anakin @ obi-wan ahsoka @ anakin luke @ anakin obi-wan @ anakin shmi @ anakin

au's. —

fratboy!anakin "final girl" sk!anakin one shot sk!anakin part two songs modern!anakin plays in his car

bonus. —

literally ahsoka tano literally cad bane literally han solo literally hayden christensen literally higher ground literally luke skywalker literally outcast literally padme amidala literally sam monroe star wars original trilogy star wars prequels star wars: the phantom menace

[engagemythrusters]

omg please talk more about Naboo when you have time!! I love reading people’s headcanons and I never thought about how so many of them cover their hair it’s so cool!!

OH okay !! Thank you for asking!! But also hold your horses bc this is about to get LONG. And rambly.

So it is my full belief that Naboo queens cover their hair. Like this initially came about because... I believe it was @star-burned who once made a post about hijabi queens. And then I was like yeah that's a whole vibe I like that. But then when I started making my own queen OC (Roona!) I started looking into it and I was like. 100% sold on the hair-covering idea. It's not a hijab, as ears aren't necessarily covered, so I have diverged from the original idea. BUT. Still along the same lines.

Sooo here's all the costumes worn by Queen Amidala (both on Padme and Sabe).

Now, here's the meta analysis:

What has ALWAYS been notable to me (even as someone young) is that like. They're wigs. Clearly they are wigs. She does not have enough hair for some of those. Yes, Padme had some decently long hair! But it was damn well not that thick. Not to mention, if you zoom in on some of the hairstyles (maybe not using these photos, bc they're taken a bit far away), they just... don't look like hair.

If you look at the hair of the retaking-Theed outfit (middle right), you can see that the hair on that is absolutely fake. The sheen of the hair is inconsistent between what wraps the headpiece and what sticks out the back. Not to mention... Where the goddamn hell is that hair even coming from. Literally not attached to her head. And if you look at what's coming out of the back is just... it's so... hard. It's all blocked together. Like maybe it's a shitton of hairproduct. That's possible for the actual actress. But it honest to god just looks like an acryllic wig. The shine and how none of it breaks like normal hair... Yeah no. My bet is Not Real. And if it is, sorry dear Ms Knightley. The hairproduct makes it look fake.

As for the top two left outfits and the center outfit... Well, for the first left and the middle, it has that same issue with those. It has no breakage or frizz. Yes, could be a lot of product! But if you look at any style Padme has in later films, she still has baby hairs and frizz and flyaways... because that's how normal hair acts. That's just how hair is. So yeah I'm not sold on the first one being real hair.

Now the mid-top does have some breakage and frizz near the base AND it is a proven possible hairstyle (that is a Mongolian traditional hairstyle! Like... near exact ripoff of it.) BUT what's in the headpiece is not the only hair. There's also a back part that has... a lot of hair. And that just... doesn't seem consistent with what Natalie Portman has for hair. YES it is likely that it has some sort of hair rat in it. But I'm looking at the pattern of the hair that's up top on the headpiece. I don't think that's real? Maybe I'm wrong but it doesn't make sense the way it comes out. Who knows tho. Maybe that's the real hair and the other is fake.

The bottom two are real hair. At least what's attached to the head is real. I can tell you that much.

But that's the META. ANd also conjecture on the meta.

What's in-canon is:

The Queen's hairstyles, which were said to take several hours to perfect, were headpieces with wigs that matched Padmé's natural hair color. Her real hair was tightly-braided, pinned down, and gelled; the gel held the headpieces in place and prevented them from itching. While the Queen's hairstyles were being created, her handmaiden Rabé would provide counsel. (source)

So. Yeah. They're all wigs.

THIS does line up with Padme's Tatooine hairstyle!

While it's not the style that would be under her wigs, it still holds all the braids.

AND So we know it's not just QUEEN AMIDALA that does this:

Jamillia's in a wig (meta and canon) and Apailana's hair is fully covered.

AND TO TOP IT ALL OFF

THE HANDMAIDENS ARE LIKE 90% OF THE TIME COVERED TOO. That spans across films. There's like one time we see hair--during the takeover of Naboo. That's literally it. The rest of the time, their hair is covered.

And honourable mentions: A lot of Padme's senator hairstyles... Wigs. Literally she popped her fuckin hair off in TCW. That shit was a wig half the time.

TL;DR? The queens are wearing wigs the times "their hair" is shown. Thus. Queens required to hide their hair--either out of social obligation or out of wish to portray themselves with ornate hairstyles to show their social standing. Either way, no "real hair" shown. All hidden.

[hedonistbyheart]

Things I feel like people consistently misunderstand about the council scene in the phantom menace:

1. Qui-Gon was not petitioning for himself to train Anakin initially. He wanted him trained in general, but the council said no so he said "I'll take responsibility and do it then". It was supernatural conviction, not a vanity project.

2. He only put Obi-Wan up for his trials because the council said he couldn't train Anakin while still having another padawan. He had no other way out if Anakin was to be trained at that point.

3. Obi-Wan is upset, because he wasn't warned or consulted (because Qui-Gon didn't plan on training Anakin himself!), but he backs up his master in the moment and doesn’t hold a personal grudge because he’s a freaking Jedi (though he continues to agree with the council on the danger Anakin poses).

4. Qui-Gon regrets hurting Obi-Wan (look at the way he glances at him) and his waspish attitude when talking about his knighting is aimed at the council, not Obi-Wan. I.e. "you are making me give him up even though he still has some things to learn, that's on you, but he can handle it".

[thehollowprince]

The Actor Who Played Jar Jar Binks Is Proud of His ‘Star Wars’ Legacy

Ahmed Best recalls the painful backlash to the “Phantom Menace” character that was considered a racial stereotype at the time but is now embraced by fans.

Ahmed Best is a futurist, an educator, a martial artist, a writer-director, and the actor behind Jar Jar Binks, the most hated character in the “Star Wars” universe.

Long-eared Jar Jar is a bipedal amphibianlike creature with an ungainly walk and a winning attitude. The groundbreaking, computer-generated goofball debuted in the first installment of George Lucas’s prequel trilogy, “Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace,” and instantly set off widespread criticism from both fans and the press.

“It took almost a mortal toll on me. It was too much,” Best recently recalled. “It was the first time in my life where I couldn’t see the future. I didn’t see any hope. Here I was at 26 years old, living my dream, and my dream was over.”

Now 50, Best is the picture of panache who could easily be mistaken for an off-duty rock star. He arrived at our interview, riding a motorcycle and wearing a blue denim jacket, black jeans, and stylish shades.

In the presence of Best’s self-assured demeanor, it’s even more shocking to learn that back in 1999, the vitriol fans flung at Jar Jar and, in turn, at him, ravaged his mental health. But he revisited these memories a few weeks before the movie’s return to theaters on Friday to commemorate the 25th anniversary of its release.

Two constellations, “Star Wars” and “Star Trek,” nurtured Best’s curiosity for both science and the arts as a child in the South Bronx. The 1977 “Star Wars” (Episode IV) was the first movie he ever saw in a cinema. Back then, being part of the intergalactic saga seemed unfathomable.

Twenty years later, Best was performing in “Stomp,” the theater show where performers communicate through rhythm and acrobatics, when Robin Gurland, the casting director on “Phantom Menace,” attended a performance in San Francisco. She had spent months conducting an exhaustive search for the actor who could embody Jar Jar’s physicality. That evening, she found him.

“There was just something so electrifying about his performance; it was natural and innovative,” Gurland said by phone. “I couldn’t take my eyes off of Ahmed.”

“What if you were from this other planet, totally different from anything we know? How would you move?” Gurland recalled asking Best during his audition at Skywalker Ranch. “He got it immediately and was able to just create this being out of thin air.”

Doug Chiang, the design director on “Phantom Menace,” remembered Lucas describing Jar Jar as a combination of the silent comedy stars Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Lucas ruled out a puppet for the alien creature, Chiang said, but still needed Jar Jar to appear grounded in reality to hold up against live actors onscreen.

“Even though this was a synthetic character, created out of ones and zeros, George wanted it to have a lot of expression,” Chiang said via video call. “The actor component was absolutely critical.”

Commonplace now, motion capture, the process of recording a person or object’s movement to serve as the basis for a digital entity, was mostly uncharted territory. Jar Jar became the first main character in a feature film created this way, though initially, the filmmakers didn’t know if it would work.

When Best landed the part as well as the separate assignment to voice the character — providing a playful take he often used with his younger cousins — he thought “it was surreal,” he recalled, adding with a laugh, “I was like, ‘Why me?’ I wanted it, of course, and I’m glad George believed in me, a 23-year-old kid from the streets of New York.”

In Chiang’s view, “Ahmed’s role in this was very understated, and it’s heartbreaking that he didn’t receive the attention and accolade because Jar Jar was a breakthrough character.”

Best spent the better part of two years working with Lucas and Industrial Light & Magic; his acting provided the physical element for the foundational software Lucasfilm created for performance capture. “I’m not Jar Jar. We are Jar Jar,” Best said, crediting the numerous artists involved at different stages of the character’s development.

But during filming, Best had doubts about the role. He credits co-star Ewan McGregor, who played Obi-Wan Kenobi, with helping him embrace Jar Jar’s inherent silliness. Best was on set with the rest of the cast, performing while wearing a suit and headpiece that resembled Jar Jar’s final look

“In one of the first scenes we shot, I was having a hard time with the line ‘Weesa going home!’ because it didn’t feel right to me,” Best recalled. “And then Ewan said, ‘But how does it feel to Jar Jar?’ That’s when I thought, ‘I’m going to take my ego out of this.’”

When he saw the final rendering of Jar Jar onscreen, he was taken aback. “I was up there, and I wasn’t up there at the exact same time,” Best said. “Jar Jar moved like me, and that was just a very odd feeling.”

Unfortunately, Jar Jar was a pioneering character in more ways than one. Critics said the character was a collection of racial stereotypes, “a Rastafarian Stepin Fetchit,” as The Wall Street Journal described him. One complaint was Jar Jar’s accent, which some perceived as derived from Jamaican patois.

“Everybody talks about Jar Jar’s accent,” said Best, who is of West Indian descent. “I read exactly what George wrote. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t an accent.”

“Back in the day, Chewbacca was seen as the Black character,” he continued. “And then Yoda was ridiculed for being an Asian stereotype. Then, the Neimoidians were ridiculed for being an Asian stereotype. ‘Star Wars’ has had a history of being a lightning rod. That’s because it’s so successful.”

No matter the context, the onslaught of negative reactions in the nascent online forums of the late ’90s, as well as in traditional media, drove him to consider suicide, he said.

Looking back now, Best said Jar Jar “was probably also the first cyber-bullied pop culture character ever.” In his view there were other factors that contributed to the barrage, including racism among fans, something another “Star Wars” performer, Kelly Marie Tran, called out in 2018 when she endured online harassment. (He said he related to “Kelly Marie for sure. She’s a phenomenal actor” and the way she was treated was “completely unwarranted.”)

“There are a lot of people who want to see Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Darth Vader for the rest of their lives, and they don’t realize that ‘Star Wars’ is changing,” Best said. He noted that the “Star Wars” franchise had yet to have a movie centered on a Black protagonist and added with a laugh, “I’m available.”

But worse than the ceaseless public scrutiny was learning that his role had been dramatically reduced for the two sequels, “Attack of the Clones” and “Revenge of the Sith.”

“As an artist, you want the respect from your peers, and I felt as if I was being scaled back because I didn’t do a good job,” he said. “It really hurt. Everybody was running away from me, including the people that I gave two years of my life to.”

Finding acting work post-“Star Wars” proved nearly impossible. The first hurdle was proving he had been in the movies: “When I’d tell people what I did as Jar Jar, they would be like, ‘That’s just animation. I don’t see your face, so how do I know it was you?’” Best recalled. “And I’d say, ‘No, it was me. I’m an actor; it’s called motion capture.”

He admitted that even all these years later he remained hesitant to talk with journalists about that time. “It’s such a cultural phenomenon, and there are few Black voices in ‘Star Wars,’ so I feel that I’m partially obliged to keep my voice out there,” he said.

Since those dark days, Best has diversified his ambitions. He’s an adjunct lecturer at the University of Southern California’s School of Dramatic Arts, where he teaches filmmaking for actors. At Stanford University’s d.school, he has taught a class revolving around Afrofuturism, a subject that informs his belief that an optimistic future is possible through the combination of narrative art and technology.

“Jar Jar represents the possibility that whatever you got in your head, creatively, we can invent a future where this thing exists,” he said. “Just because no one has done it before, doesn’t mean it can’t be done.”

Throughout the years, Jar Jar hasn’t entirely left Best’s life. The actor has voiced the character in video games and in animated shows like “Star Wars: The Clone Wars.”

“It’s big, and it tends to overtake your life,” Best said. “The thoughts I’ve had were, ‘Who am I outside of this?’ Because as an artist, you don’t want to be locked into one thing.”

More recently, he’s rejoined the “Star Wars” universe in his own body, as the warrior teacher Kelleran Beq on the children’s show “Jedi Temple Challenge” and in an episode of “The Mandalorian.”

“This is going to sound really corny, please forgive me, but it felt like coming home,” Best said.

Despite the baggage, Best never stopped loving Jar Jar. When he meets fans — on the rare occasions that he agrees to appear at conventions — Best has noticed it’s usually young children, people with disabilities and those who have been ostracized who identify most with Jar Jar. “He’s misunderstood, but Jar Jar’s heart is so pure,” he said.

At the time of the backlash, Lucas assured Best that Jar Jar’s target audience — who were kids and for whom the character would become a fond childhood memory — would eventually come to his defense. “He was right,” Best said. “It’s a different story now.”

Witness the reception for Best in 2019 at “Star Wars” Celebration, an event dedicated to the franchise, when fans welcomed him with thunderous applause. “It really warmed my heart to see him get that,” Chiang recalled.

Heart comes up a lot when Best’s name is mentioned.

Dave Filoni, the chief creative officer of Lucasfilm and a writer on “The Mandalorian,” described him as “a unique talent, and no one can replicate what he brings through his performance as Jar Jar. There is comedy, but also a lot of heart.”

And Best takes solace in the role he’s played behind the scenes as well. He noted that the software developed through his work as Jar Jar became central to the creation of future C.G.I. characters.

“I’m in there,” Best said. “You can’t have Gollum without Jar Jar. You can’t have the Na’vi in ‘Avatar’ without Jar Jar. You can’t have Thanos or the Hulk without Jar Jar. I was the signal for the rest of this art form, and I’m proud of Jar Jar for that, and I’m proud to be a part of that. I’m in there!”

[thegoodplacey]

My family showed me that there is a Star Wars prequels vending machine somewhere in Mt. Washington that they never recalled! So cool to see it in person!

[cressida-jayoungr]

One Dress a Day Challenge

May: Purple Redux

Star Wars, episode I: The Phantom Menace / Natalie Portman as Padmé Amidala*

Padmé* wears this deep purple gown for the trip back to attempt to liberate Naboo, in recognition of her people's suffering. She also wears it to Qui-Gon's funeral. It's not the most glamorous of her gowns, but there is a definite air of somber regal-ness to it.

As can be seen from the display photo, this is an example of a costume whose color changes fairly drastically with lighting and filters. The designer was Tricia Biggar. Here is the description of this costume from the Star Wars fandom wiki:

"The paneled velvet overdress was covered with a discharge-printed Naboo pattern and fastened at the shoulders and neck with matching velvet buttons. It parted over a pleated silk underdress, which was worn over layers of stiffened petticoats. Under the overdress were the petal-shaped undersleeves, which were made of a double layer of shot-silk chiffon satin, and fitted finger-length corded inner sleeves. The veils were made from chiffon, and the headdress was gold, embossed with the Naboo emblem."

*I think it's actually one of her handmaidens/decoys in the costume in the picture, but I'm not sure which one. Nope, apparently it's actually her. Never mind!

[sapphickittykatherine]

student/teacher bonds are everything to me bro... looking up to someone and trusting them enough to learn from them, taking someone under your wing and putting in the effort to nurture them and their skills... it's such a pure and strangely strong bond. not family, not friends, not lovers, but something unique. some examples i adore are saitama and genos, and qui-gon jin and obi-wan. i know that saitama found genos annoying at first, and probably still does at times, but he still clearly cares for him. any moment where he steps in to protect genos drives me insane bro. that's literally his disciple. and is there any moment more emotionally charged than obi-wan cradling his master as he dies? keeping his promise to train anakin, even against his own judgement, because he trusts and respects his tutor? i'm genuinely losing it

[alphamecha-mkii]

Star Wars: The Phantom Menace - Pod Racer Concept Art by John Bell

[haaaaaaaaaaaave-you-met-ted]

Star Wars: The Phantom Menace - Sith Witch Concept Art by Ian McCaig

[silara]