Star Trek vs. Star Wars (and a collection of memes)

Easy... Gungans! Bye bye Jar Jar!

 

I have to say I would want to get more data before I committed passive genocide. I would not damn an entire race due to Jar Jar.

Not when there are numberless assassins and bounty hunters available...

 

What about from a fan-movie perspective? What species would you remove from the films? (i.e. not genocide, but a creative / story-telling change)

 

I knew that was what you meant originally, I just thought it was amusing viewed in another light!

I wouldn't remove the Gungans. When I think over what I have seen, I think I would remove the Gremlin-like creature from RotJ that has this nasty cackle and eats C3PO's eyes. It annoyed the s**t out of me.

I liked the Gungans. Even despite Jar-Jar (even Heroes can have lice). Their seemingly low-tech society, was surprising high-tech and I was routing for them when they were fighting the droid army.

Some people hated the Porgs. I thought they were fantastic. Especially the one that learns to scream like a wookie on the Falcon.

Some people hated the Ewoks. I actually quite liked them, even if their winning over the storm troopers was unrealistic.

To me, the vast, vast majority of the creatures in the Star Wars universe serve to create a backdrop for the story. Love the whole thing.

My favourite creature is, hands down, Wookies. What a fantastic idea. I also loved the interplay between the people who speak wookie and Chewbacca (OT, Solo movie, Last Jedi). Really amazing idea.

 

It was!

I hated those damn Ewoks. They are the reason why Episode V edges out Episode VI in my eyes.

 

Ha! Everyone in my family loves them. We used to have a tradition of always watching RotJ every Christmas re-run.

Thank you.... I guess? He really is a seriously irritating little s**t. As a kid, I remember yelling for him to get off C3PO.

So you would erase the Gungans? Seems like this needs a poll...

If only there was someone who was an expert on polls around.....

 

We'd need a comprehensive list of all the races that people might vote for. There are far more races in Star Wars than options we can include in a poll.

 

You sneaky devil.

You said the above and then put a profile post link to your original picture! A poll that is not a poll.

Well played.

 

Actually the flicker preceded my making of the the comment by a couple of hours. I put it there so people arriving late to the party could still weigh in on the topic and not have the question lost among the many pages (and memes) of this thread.

Hahaha... I like that!

 

Hating all the Gungans just because of Jar Jar would be like saying all humans are Mr. Bean or Frank Spencer, which of course they’re not.

The Gungans are pretty cool if you discount Jar Jar. Indeed they are my favourite race, with Geonosians second and Wookiees third.

Remember in Episode I Jar Jar was an outcast, and Boss Nass was going to sentence him to death for returning to Gunga City, only relenting when Qui-Gon offered to take him off his hands permanently. They were fed up with him unwittingly causing trouble and accidentally destroying things, and the Boss had finally put his foot down. They had put up with Jar Jar for quite a long time knowing that his accidents weren’t done on purpose, and they could be seen as quite a tolerant culture because of that.

When Boss Nass decided to make Jar Jar the general of the Grand Army, he was mistakenly believing that because Jar Jar had companions around him that weren’t telling him to go away/trying to kill him/ignoring him completely, and because it was Jar Jar that in essence got the Naboo and Gungans together to form an alliance, he was starting to show signs of maturity (though in reality he was still his original self), which again is a sign that the Gungans were still wishing him the best despite his lack of intelligence and accident-prone nature, further evidence of their tolerance as a people. In any case during the battle the real Gungan commanders take absolutely no notice of Jar Jar anyway, simply dismissing Boss Nass’ act as a nicety and nothing more.

Now a really good Gungan character that I have talked about on this forum before (though it was before you joined @Lizards of Renown) is Captain Tarpals:

Recognise him? He’s the Gungan who first apprehends Jar Jar and the two Jedi when they first arrive at Gunga City and takes them to Boss Nass.

Later on in the film he pretty much straightaway takes over command of the Gungan Army, knowing Jar Jar’s ineptness in any military role, and tries in vain to stop Jar Jar doing anything stupid, ultimately giving up and facepalming when Jar Jar surrenders instantly:


Later on in the Clone Wars CGI series he’s quite rightly promoted to General for holding everything together in that Episode I Battle, and joins forces with Anakin and Padme to try and stop a Separatist plot to get the Naboo and Gungans fighting each other after only 10 years of the peace treaty that was signed at the end of Episode I. I won’t spoil what happens until you see the episode because he has a really good scene there, and just like Chewie’s the epitome of a Wookiee, Tarpals shows just how brave and heroic a Gungan can be.

That’s one of the things I like most about them too - they may look primitive to outsiders but unlike the Ewoks who actually are primitive, the Gungans are quite advanced but in a different way to everyone else. They’re masters at manipulating biotechnology to grow buildings and develop powerful weapons that can short-circuit Droids and stun or even kill living beings. They have shieldwall Infantry that are good at both ranged and melee combat, Cavalry to outflank the foe, giant catapults and, if that’s not enough for you, Army-wide shield generators!

Haha, I think it’s quite funny that of all the races you could have chosen, you picked that little guy. Luckily they don’t feature much beyond him in the Jabba scenes and another of his kind accompanying a Weequay pirate captain as his parrot in the Clone Wars CGI series, so you’re largely safe.

Agreed, the Porgs were actually pretty well done, principally because they avoided the Ewok trap and made them simply an animal species rather than a sentient race, so that they wouldn’t do anything that affected the plot beyond comic relief and thus wouldn’t give the writers an excuse to make up silly storylines about them nuking the First Order by themselves or rubbish like that just to entertain the kiddies.

Ewoks are the race in Star Wars I’d exterminate, because their victory against the Empire was more than just unrealistic, it was utterly stupid.

At least with the Gungans, as @Lizards of Renown and I have both said, though their technology looks primitive it is pretty advanced in its own way. Additionally, Gungans are very tall and flexible (their skeleton’s made of cartilage rather than bone in the lore), allowing them to be dangerous unarmed combatants too. Ewoks on the other hand have none of these advantages. If we discount all of the stupid plot armour in the Original Trilogy, and pit an Ewok against a Stormtrooper, the Ewok is hopelessly disadvantaged - he has a massive size disadvantage, he has much smaller legs so can’t run as fast, he wears no armour at all and has weapons that would never even be able to dent the plastoid outer layer of Stormtrooper armour in a million years. The only way he’d be able to last more than two seconds against a Stormtrooper would be if he hid in ferns and ran up to the Stormtrooper through the ferns where the trooper wouldn’t be able to easily pick him out, and even then how would the Ewok be able to kill his opponent with technology that is around 20,000 years inferior?

It also stretches believability to see a military-grade armoured walker being squashed in one blow by two logs swung either side of it - given that Ewoks aren’t very strong individually and the Walker itself surely would have been given all sorts of stress testing on its armour to make sure its armour would be able to withstand great pressures, it does look dumb. What’s more, where were the AT-ATs in the final battle on Endor, given we saw one when Luke surrendered to Vader at the shuttle pad there? What were its crew doing, having a tea break? Surely Palpatine would have given them orders to support the units defending the shield generator complex and exterminate all attackers? Ridiculous.

Probably the only thing I can think of that was actually good about the Ewoks was that Wicket was the debut role for the legend that is Warwick Davis. If it hadn’t been for the Ewoks we may not have seen him in the acting scene until later.

You’re missing a treat in Episode III then, because

Spoiler: If you haven’t seen Episode III

We finally get to see Kashyyyk, the Wookiee homeworld, and a young Chewie helping to defend it against the Separatists!

According to several sources it is believed that it had originally been intended to have the Second Death Star be constructed over the Wookiee homeworld (whether they were going to call it by its current name or not I don’t know), and it was originally going to be the Wookiees that helped the Rebellion to destroy the shield generator - that would have been so much better, as we could have seen Wookiees throwing Stormtroopers across the battlefield and hovering around on Ornithopters blasting them from above and would have made so much more sense and looked so much better.

This is another reason why I like the Prequel Trilogy best, because they spent so much time building each of the worlds they visit so they had their own native races and ecosystems, and it just works so well because you get to know where all the different species originate and how they interact with each other as nations in their own right. They did this to a lesser extent in the OT as well (Tatooine and Endor), but other times in the OT and in all the Disney films (even my favourite, Rogue One) they just couldn’t get beyond having urban scenes with all these random pointless aliens from all different planets that aren’t even mentioned, and personally I think that’s rather lazy because you don’t have a clue where any of these guys come from, they’re just there for no apparent reason other than to fill in the set.