And just as it had in Hawaii centuries before, surfing became more than just a sport, but the center of an entire culture—in this case, pop culture. It began in 1957 when Hollywood screenwriter Frederick Kohner created a character based on his teenage daughter’s exploits in the burgeoning surf scene at Malibu Beach. He named the character Gidget, short for “Girl Midget.” The Gidget franchise went on to include seven novels, three films, and a television series. Surf movies became drive-in staples: Elvis Presley rode the waves in 1961 in Blue Hawaii; and in 1966 filmmaker Bruce Brown made what has become the classic surf documentary, The Endless Summer, which followed two surfers as they spent the summer chasing waves around the globe.
By the mid-1960s, teenagers from the quiet shores of the east coast to the land-locked Midwest were watching Gidget movies and listening to the Beach Boys. Those kids dreamed of moving to California to take up the surfing lifestyle. And they did—in droves.
WAVE GOODBYE
For the old guard of surfers who’d pioneered the California version of the sport, all this new attention wasn’t necessarily a good thing. More than the Hollywood sanitization of their lifestyle, they grumbled that their once-pristine beaches had become crowded overnight. Many of them left California and relocated to Hawaii…or to wherever on Earth they could find big waves.
That emigration, along with the advent of wetsuits for surfing cold waters, made the possibilities endless. In the chilly seas off Alaska, extreme surfers wait for chunks of glacier to fall into the sea and then try to ride the massive waves they cause. In the Amazon River, waves from the Atlantic Ocean, known as tidal bores, can roll 100 miles or more upstream from where the river meets the ocean. Surfers sometimes ride a single wave for as long as half an hour, covering distances up to seven miles.
Yet Hawaii remains the mecca to surfers the world over. Enthusiasts make pilgrimages to the islands not just for the near-perfect conditions, but also to surf the same waves where the kings of old perfected the art so many generations ago.
RANDOM FACTS
• One of the strangest surfing records was set in the summer of 2005 at a surfing competition in Australia: 47 surfers rode together on one giant, 40-foot, 1,200-pound surfboard.
• The most surfers ever to ride a single wave was 73, set in 2006 at Muizenberg Corner, a beach in Cape Town, South Africa.
• Dave “Daily” Webster of Bodega Bay, California, surfed every day from September 3, 1975 to February 29, 2009—10,407 days in a row. (He worked nights so he’d never miss an opportunity to catch a wave.)
THE PHYSICS OF SURFING
On page 463, we told you the history of
surfing. Here’s how they do it.
CATCH A WAVE
When a surfer rides a wave toward shore, it may look as though the board and rider are being propelled by the rushing water. But they’re not. In fact, the act of surfing is more like riding a skateboard down a hill. The difference is that a surfer is sliding down the face of a hill made of water.
An ocean wave moves through water that stays relatively still. Think of a gull floating in the ocean. When a wave comes along, the gull floats up to the top and then back down without being carried along with it. Waves don’t carry water—or anything else—with them until they break on the beach.
When a wave breaks, it’s because it has run into land. Half of a wave is above the water’s surface and the other half is below. As the wave approaches the beach, it moves into shallower water. The bottom of the wave slows down when it begins to run into the ocean floor, but the top keeps going just as fast. As the top of the wave outpaces the bottom, the moving hill of water gets steeper until it breaks into white water and falls in front of itself with incredible weight and force. It’s as the wave stands up and gets ready to break that a surfer wants to begin sliding down its face.
GET ON BOARD
• Surf boards come in all shapes and sizes, but are divided into two broad categories: Long boards and short boards.
• Long boards generally range from 9 to 12 feet long. Because of their greater size and mass, they offer more stability but are not as maneuverable as short boards. Beginning surfers usually start with long boards and move up to smaller boards as their skills improve.
• Why is there a fin on the bottom of a surfboard? It provides stability and prevents the board from sliding sideways.
HOW TO TELL IF YOU’VE BEEN ABDUCTED BY ALIENS
Believe it or not, there is a support group called Abduct Anon for people
who believe they’ve been kidnapped by extraterrestrials. Are you about to
be abducted by aliens and subjected to medical experiments? Or has it
happened already? Here are some signs that Abduct Anon and
other UFO groups say you should be on the watch for.
AT BEDTIME
• You have chronic insomnia, and you hear a tapping or humming noise just as you’re dropping off to sleep.
• You may dream of aliens and UFOs directly, or you may dream of vaguely mysterious beings but remember none of the details except one: The beings had very large eyes.
• You have the feeling you’re being watched, especially as you’re dropping off to sleep. Or you wake up in the middle of the night because you think someone—or something—is watching you. You may even see one or more shadowy figures standing around the bed, staring at you.
• You sleepwalk. You’ve gone to sleep in one place and woken up in another with no explanation for how it happened. (And alcohol is not involved.)
• For the first few seconds or minutes after awakening, you are paralyzed and cannot move your body.
• When you wake up you find small drops of blood on your pillow, but there’s no explanation for how they got there.
ON THE ROAD
• Your car breaks down unexpectedly with no explanation, often soon after you’ve spotted a UFO.
• You pull over to the side of the road…and the next thing you remember is standing next to or driving your car. Hours or even days may have passed, but you have no memory of what has happened in the meantime. Your “broken-down” car is running again, and you have no explanation for that, either.
• You have the sense that you have levitated or passed through solid objects such as the doors or roof of your car, perhaps as the aliens lifted you into their spacecraft.
DURING THE DAY
• You see smoke, fog, or haze at a time and in a place for which there is no logical explanation.
• You have an unexplained, irresistible desire to walk or drive to a particular location, where you believe something “familiar, yet unknown” will soon happen. You may experience a heightened level of anxiety in the days leading up to this strange happening.
PHYSICAL CHANGES
• You begin to get frequent nosebleeds and you don’t know why.
• You have unexplained soreness or stiffness, or a mysterious rash on one or more parts of your body. There may also be evidence that your skin has been scraped (and a sample taken).
• You find new scars on your body and you have no idea how they got there. (And alcohol is not involved.)
• When you go in for your annual physical, your doctor finds strange, tiny probes implanted in your body.
WHAT’S UP, DOC?
• You may have a dim memory of a very probing (hint, hint) medical exam conducted against your will.
• You may also have memories of having your head placed in some kind of restraining device as long needles are inserted into your nostrils or ears, or something drills into your skull. These sensations may be accompanied by a burning smell. Human medical examiners who look you over after the fact find no signs that such procedures have taken place.
AFTER THE FACT
• There may be evidence that the scene of your abduction has have been “staged” to look as if nothing has happened, but a few incorrect details might be noticeable. For example, if you went to bed wearing pajamas, you may wake up nud
e or dressed only in underwear, with the pajamas folded neatly and placed at the foot of the bed. You may even wake up in the wrong room of the house. If you were abducted from your car, you may find that items in the car or in the trunk have been moved around.
• Your ability to remember things suddenly becomes stronger, and you may even develop psychic powers that enable you to see events in the future.
• You suddenly get a sense of mission or the feeling that you have been chosen (by the aliens) for an important purpose, but you don’t know what it is. This often replaces feelings of low self-esteem that you had before the alien encounter.
• Electronic appliances behave strangely when you pass by. Computers crash, clocks lose time, radio and TV reception is distorted, and streetlights go dark as you walk under them.
• You develop a new phobia of some kind. Did you suddenly become afraid of spiders? Heights? Enclosed spaces? Crowds? The aliens may be to blame.
• You become obsessive-compulsive or develop addictions that you didn’t have before.
• You become less trusting of other people, especially doctors, police, and other authority figures, than you were before.
• You have an uncontrollable urge to take vitamins.
• You develop an interest in UFOs, astronomy, or physics. Or, conversely, an aversion to being around other people when they are discussing these subjects.
…DON’T LEAVE EARTH WITHOUT IT
If this topic has unsettled you, fear not! The St. Lawrence Agency of Altamonte Springs, Florida, sells a UFO abduction insurance policy that pays out $10 million, with a double-indemnity payment of $20 million “if the aliens insist on conjugal visits.” Cost: $19.95 plus $3.00 for same-day shipping. The policy pays out $1 per year for 10 million years or until the death of the policy holder, whichever comes first.
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JAR JAR BINKS
He could’ve gone down in movie history as
more than just another character in the Star Wars
saga, because he really was a pioneer in digital filmmaking.
In the end, Jar Jar did become a cultural phenomenon, though
for all the wrong reasons. Here’s his fascinating—and tragic—story.
WE WAITED FOR THIS?
May 19, 1999, was a pop culture milestone: Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, the first Star Wars movie in 16 years, opened in the United States. It set a single-day box-office record, bringing in $28 million. More than two million people took the day off of work to see it. And what did those fans get after all of the hype? A movie that drew mixed reviews at best.
And as the summer rolled on, one name kept popping up in news reports and on Internet message boards: Jar Jar Binks. While there was some disagreement as to whether the rest of the film worked, the alien sidekick character was almost universally reviled. A typical review came from the Village Voice: “Jar Jar sucks the oxygen out of every scene he’s in.” So what went wrong?
SUPPORTING CAST
While outlining The Phantom Menace in the mid-1990s, Star Wars creator George Lucas wanted a character that served the same purpose as R2-D2 and C-3PO had in the original trilogy—someone who had no special abilities but could comment on the proceedings, provide comic relief, and even help out in the end.
So he created Jar Jar Binks, member a race of amphibian-like creatures called Gungans who live on the planet Naboo. In the movie, we learn that Jar Jar’s people banished him from their underwater city because he’s clumsy. While living on the surface, Jar Jar meets two Jedi knights who are on a mission to warn the planet’s human population of an imminent invasion. Jar Jar joins forces with the good guys, gets in all sorts of trouble, makes a lot of wisecracks, provides plot exposition for younger viewers, and ends up an unwitting hero in the final battle.
Lucas had another goal for Jar Jar: to make him the first 100 percent computer-generated character who interacts with live actors. So Jar Jar couldn’t be a puppet (like Yoda) or a man in a suit (like Chewbacca). Instead, his exaggerated movements, floppy ears, and long snout were created by Industrial Light & Magic. Helping bring the character to life was a dancer named Ahmed Best, who provided Jar Jar’s voice and big, loping movements. “I wore what’s called a motion capture suit, which is like a tight scuba suit with a bunch of light sensors on it,” he recalled. “They had infrared cameras that caught the light-sensor data and input that into a computer.” Then digital animators “painted” Binks over the infrared images of Best. The process took nearly two years and resulted in the first completely digitized principle character in movie history. But that wasn’t what people were talking about.
A STAR IS TORN
The first thing that annoyed viewers was Jar Jar’s squeaky voice and fractured grammar: “Mesa day startin’ pretty okee-day with a brisky morning munchy, then BOOM! Gettin’ very scared and grabbin’ that Jedi and POW! Mesa here!”
People didn’t merely dislike Jar Jar Binks—they hated him. Several organizations sprang up calling for the alien’s head, such as the “Society for the Extermination of Jar Jar Binks” and “Jar Jar Binks Must Die! ”—which was also the title of a song by the rap group Damn Nation. Sample lyrics: “He’s got big freakin’ ears, and eyes like a bug / Every time I eat a taco I see his ugly mug.” (People were also upset by the rampant use of the character in TV commercials.) One Star Wars fan, Mike Nichols, was so disappointed by Episode I that he recut the film on his home computer—removing most of Jar Jar’s scenes and dialogue—and released it online as The Phantom Edit…to rave reviews.
And then there were the accusations of racism. To some critics, Jar Jar’s dialect, combined with his long “dreadlocks-style” ears, were reminiscent of drugged-out Jamaicans. To Brent Staples of the New York Times, “Jar Jar lopes along in a combination shuffle and pimp walk. Binks is by far the stupidest person in the film. His simple-minded devotion to his (white) Jedi masters has reminded people of Hollywood’s most offensive racial stereotypes.”
THE FILMMAKERS STRIKE BACK
Suddenly, instead of celebrating the achievement of the first digital character, Lucas was defending him. He wasn’t caught completely off guard, though—many older filmgoers didn’t like the “cute” Ewoks from 1983’s Return of the Jedi, either. His standard defense: “The movies are for children but the older fans don’t want to admit that. They want the films to be tough like The Terminator .” Lucas maintained that he didn’t model the alien after African Americans or Jamaicans. Jar Jar, he said, was a combination of Charlie Chaplin, Jimmy Stewart, and Danny Kaye. And his exaggerated walk wasn’t a “pimp walk,” it was an effect of his amphibious nature—Jar Jar walks as if he’s swimming. Concerning the alien’s voice, Lucas charged that those critiques were made by people “who’ve obviously never met a Jamaican, because it’s definitely not Jamaican and if you were to say those lines in Jamaican they wouldn’t be anything like that.” Best, an African American, also denied the voicework was racist, explaining that he and the filmmakers wanted it to sound “fun.”
DEMOTED
Jar Jar’s role was greatly reduced in 2002’s Episode II: Attack of the Clones. He appears only in a few scenes, though one is crucial to the greater story arc: He’s been appointed representative of Naboo, and is unwittingly duped into making a motion in the Galactic Senate that will grant absolute power to Supreme Chancellor Palpatine. Without realizing it, Jar Jar is instrumental in turning Palpatine into the evil emperor, the saga’s true villain.
In Episode III, Jar Jar makes only one cameo appearance. Though Lucas maintains he’d always planned to cut back on the part, movie insiders insist that it was actually done in response to the massively negative reaction.
Adding insult to injury, all of the technical accolades Lucas was expecting for Jar Jar never happened. Instead, they were bestowed upon the similarly rendered character of Gollum in 2002’s The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Gollum’s creators, not Jar Jar’s, won the Academy Award. (Jar Jar supporters are quick t
o point out that among all of the problems people have with him, most viewers take his presence on the screen for granted, at least proving the filmmakers got that part right.)
ATTACK OF THE CLOWNS
Today, Jar Jar is still disliked, having been named in several polls “the most annoying character in movie history.” But he does have his supporters. In 2009 filmmaker and Huffington Post columnist Bryan Young wrote a passionate defense of the character:I find Jar Jar just as obnoxious as you guys do. But that doesn’t mean I don’t like him and that he doesn’t serve a specific and brilliant purpose to the Star Wars saga. Looking to Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, we see Lancelot the Clown featuring prominently in the early act of the play, providing useful commentary, lessons, and above all, laughs—and then largely disappearing later in the body of the work. Jar Jar works the same way. His role in the second episode was particularly poignant and explored how even the most well-meaning person can, by no fault of anything but his intention to do the right thing, be manipulated into perpetrating a great evil.
Here’s another view: In 2009 New Yorker columnist Amy Davidson used Jar Jar in a political commentary. Contrary to the popular opinion that former President George W. Bush was the Darth Vader to Vice President Dick Cheney’s Emperor, she wrote, Bush was more akin to “Jar Jar Binks, who, after a buffoonish youth, improbably rises to a prominent political position and obliviously fronts for the soon-to-be emperor in getting the Star Wars equivalent of the PATRIOT Act passed.”
Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader Page 55
