A lot of Star Wars fans probably wish they could forget Jar Jar Binks, the annoying kid-friendly mascot who stumbled his way through The Phantom Menace and then helped make the Galactic Empire possible by granting emergency political powers to Chancellor Palpatine during the Clone Wars, but he was still a pretty high-tech amalgamation of CG magic and actual human acting for the time. Recently, though, Wired released a video with Andy Serkis—the current master of combining CG magic with actual acting—that details the history of motion capture technology, and it actually does seem to ignore everybody’s favorite Gungan senator.
Ahmed Best, the man who played Jar Jar, politely called out Serkis and Wired for this in a Twitter thread, saying, “I feel I have been forgotten.” He also says that leaving out Jar Jar’s “place in history” is “to deny the hundreds of VFX technicians, animators, code writers, and producers” the respect they earned by working to bring the character to life. He also says that he likes to tell people, “Jar Jar walked so Gollum could run. Gollum ran so the Na’vi could fly.”