Jar Jar's Unseen Contribution

I always seem to end up in movie theaters when the audience is relatively empty. Which can be nice. But it can also be really fun to get sucked into the audience emotion. 

I rarely get to hear much crowd reaction. There are a few exceptions. For example, I have never heard so much weeping in a theater as I did during Les Miserables (both the ending, and when Javert pins his badge onto Gavroche). 

I can only think of one instance where the audience started cheering while I was in the theater. It was in Star Wars: Attack of the clones, when Yoda pulled out his lightsaber. The entire audience started chanting, "Yoda! Yoda!" 

I remember that scene quite fondly. 

And I just learned that we have Jar Jar to thank for that battle. 

In the script of the movie, there was a single line saying that there's an epic battle between Yoda and Dooku. The guy in charge of creating this scene stared at that single line and went to George Lucas to ask for some more information. George Lucas basically smiled and said, "good luck." So this animator was at a loss for how to turn a single bland line into an entire epic battle. 

This was when Ahmed Best - voice and motion capture for Jar Jar Binks, found him and asked why he looked so down. 

It turns out that Ahmed Best is a black belt. (Man, that feels like a wasted opportunity - they could have used that in Star Wars!) He brought the animator over to watch a bunch of anime and martial arts movies, as examples of epic fights. 

It also turns out that Ahmed Best was in Stomp. My mom took me to see Stomp when I was a kid. I loved it. It's like a percussion concert, where the guys climb around on the sets and play all kinds of strange things as if they were instruments, such as trash cans. I wonder if he was in the show I saw!