I am Jar Jar Binks. I’m not joking.

Living in San Anselmo, California had many benefits. One of which was the local TCBY, This Country’s Best Yogurt, although sometimes I don’t agree, but I digress.

Anyway, George Lucas would often visit the local TCBY. So one day when I was four and had just moved to California from Washington D.C., I went to this TCBY and I saw George Lucas. I had been told by my family friend who works at Pixar that George Lucas made the Star Wars movies, so knowing this, I went up to him and asked him what was going to happen in the next Star Wars movie, but I said it in an extremely weird voice because I was nervous. He simply told me that he couldn’t tell me because it was a secret.

I saw him at TCBY on many occasions over the course of 1998, the year before Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace reached theatres. By the fifth or sixth time I had done this he became extremely annoyed with me and just wouldn’t answer me anymore.

The next year, 1999, Star Wars Episode I came out. In that movie a new character appeared named Jar Jar Binks (although the series came out in a mixed order, so he actually is an old character that was introduced late, or maybe on time because the movies were planned to come out in that order and the characters were supposed to be introduced this way… I digress)

While I watched the movie I couldn’t help but notice the resemblance between Jar Jar and me. My name is JJ, his is Jar Jar; but the name is only the beginning. This stuff is no coincidence.

In the movie, Jar Jar wears a brown vest, when I was four and five, I had a fantasy that I would become a cowboy one day, and I wore a brown vest everywhere; I wore a brown vest to bed, in the shower, to school; everywhere. And the facial resemblance, please, he looks just like me. There are also similarities in the amount of toes we have (three), and his ears are practically identical to mine (my father’s, father’s aunt was half elephant-pterodactyl.) And I mentioned the weird voice I used when I talked to him, the voices are the same. And what about the timing of all this? I first encountered him a year before the film came out, which is just enough time to add a character into the plotline.

Jar Jar was included in the Time Magazine review of the movie as “The Gungan klutz Jar Jar Binks, who talks (sometimes unintelligibly) like a Muppet Peter Lorre and walks as if he had Slinkys for legs, is more annoying than endearing.”

There is no reason a character should be as bad as this one unless it was added in late, or inspired by a child.

In this case, it is both of those.

So now I am contemplating filing a lawsuit against George Lucas for identity and personality infringement.

So to George Lucas, get an imagination, and, I’ll see you in court.