The Phantom Menace

Where did that come from? Indiana!

When Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace pod-raced into cinemas in May 1999, it was met with a well-documented head-scratching, lamentation, hand wringing and, yes, celebration. It was a cultural split-screen: some spent years trying to forgive (or forget) the movie, others have spent years trying to explain their love for it.

We’re approaching the 25th anniversary of Episode I’s release. (See also: my mid-life crisis.) Episode I has been maligned and defended for a quarter century. I’ve spent quite a lot of that time telling family and friends why I like the movie, so, you know, I don’t feel an urgent need to do so on Ahch-To Baby.

Less well-trod ground, though, is where The Phantom Menace came from. The Phantom Menace did not simply spring fully-formed from the 16 year void between Episodes VI and I. In fact, George Lucas’s work in the intervening years provided more than a few hints as what was to come.

It’s been well-chronicled that Lucas was persuaded by the digital animation advances in Jurassic Park, and even Willow, that he could bring his visual imagination to the screen. But it wasn’t ILM that held the clues for what would become The Phantom Menace’s story and tone. For that, one needed to look further afield: Chicago and Indiana.

Radioland Murders was a George Lucas joint, released just four years before The Phantom Menace. It seems about as far away from Star Wars as possible, a gag-laden period piece about a Chicago radio station embroiled in a madcap murder-comedy. But it shares a producer (Rick McCallum), a cinematographer (David Tattersall), and a production designer (Gavin Bocquet). It’s a story by George Lucas himself, alongside longtime collaborators Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, who worked on the screenplays of American Graffiti and Temple of Doom. (Does anyone know why they didn’t work on the prequels?)

Upon release, Radioland Murders’ reviews were savage, criticized for being scattershot and unfunny. Nonetheless, I’d recommend giving it a look. In an era where many films come from the same factory floor, it’s a totally unique artifact, entirely out-of-step with the 1990s, imperfectly perfect, fun and weird. It’s also got a crazy great cast: Christopher Lloyd, Michael McKean, Mary Stuart Masterson, Brian Benben (if you know, you know), Ned Beatty, even Dylan Baker in a small role. Plus, there are more tea leaves to read here than the overlapping creative teams (and an early use of digital set extensions).

Radioland Murders is Exhibit A of just how stubbornly George Lucas commits to his particular obsessions. In 1994, the year Pulp Fiction was released, when comedies like Beavis & Butthead and Ace Ventura are popular, George Lucas released a 1930s-style screwball comedy about radio.

His inspirations are all in the past: cinema, radio, and television history. Between Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menace, for example, seminal big-budget action films were out there to steal from or be inspired by (Aliens, Robocop, Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade, The Terminator films). The Matrix, chock-full of cyberpunk and anime, was released the same year as The Phantom Menace. Over in Lucasland, he essentially ignored all that material. He referenced Ben Hur (1959) and The Hidden Fortress (1958). Radioland Murders showed how allergic Lucas was to putting his finger on the pulse.

But it was The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles (now on Disney Plus as the re-edited The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones) that clearly foreshadowed Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace. Not only because the team behind-the-scenes is largely the same (McCallum, Bocquet and Tattersall are all back, joined by Trisha Biggar as the costume designer, would would serve in that capacity for Episode I) but because Young Indy is the prequel series that Lucas made before the Prequels. It shows how Lucas approached exactly the same kind of mission.

For example, Lucas, in Young Indy, casts his famed protagonist as a kid, which he did immediately afterwards with Anakin Skywalker in The Phantom Menace.

He later recast the roles with dashing young men.

It would have been conventional, and probably easier, to start Episode I as the story of Anakin and Obi-Wan, a Jedi Knight and his hotshot trainee, one in his thirties the other in his twenties. Just as it would have been the obvious choice to make The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles a series of Sean Patrick Flanery vehicles, and skipped Indiana Jones as a preteen. Casting children in both roles was a creatively challenging choice that George Lucas made… twice.

Moreover, Young Indiana Jones largely the eschews the popcorn-friendly Spielberg style. The show was not a romp. There were exceptions (Treasure of the Peacock’s Eye imitated the films a bit; there’s a showdown with Vlad the Impaler that’s got some silly magic), but most of the show is basically educational. Lucas even produced a hundred documentaries that were meant to be released alongside the Young Indy episodes, as a resource for teaching history to high school students.

In the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, Indiana Jones is not really an action hero. He’s, more often, a tourist or spy. He sees the world. He talks to friends, soldiers, captains, contacts, love interests. He does a lot of lying about who he is and sneaking into and out of places. He’s passing along messages. He’s bearing witness to history, not leaping off of trains or hanging off the bottom of racing trucks.

History is, after all, a series of treaties and negotiations. Meetings and messages. Fist fights and car chases don’t play into it that often. If you want to make a story about history, you’ll have to shoehorn in the derring-do. Christopher Lee, for example, appears in the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. Is he a menacing swordsman ala Count Dooku? No. He’s trying, unsuccessfully, to get a treaty signed for Karl I of Austria.

This is exactly what we get in Star Wars. The Jedi of Episode I are emissaries, negotiators, sneaking into and out of palaces, attending council meetings, and bringing a wayward political leader to the capitol. Is there action in Episode I? Yes. Spectacular action. But the action is fit into the periphery of a trade dispute that even the characters call “trivial.”

I think it’s screenwriting 101 to never call your own plot points trivial. You want the audience to invest in the stakes of your story. But trivial, in history, doesn’t mean what it does in a standard screenplay. Trivial just means the characters can’t see how important the events they are a part of will be in hindsight. That’s how history works. Episode I, essentially, treats Star Wars history the way Young Indiana Jones Chronicles treats actual history.

Finally, there’s another minor motif that carried over from Chronicles to The Phantom Menace: establishing shots. The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles were shot on location, all over the world. Because of this, you’ll notice lots of shots of where, exactly, they were. (Why go on location if you’re not going to show off Venice?) This habit transferred over to the prequels, where establishing shots, of Naboo, of Coruscant, feel like the camera crew wanted to show the audience how beautiful these places would be to visit. Never mind they were entirely made up in the computer, these establishing shots have the cadence and appearance of a crew shooting on location, a hallmark of Young Indiana Jones.

Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace, more than any other Star Wars film, felt like a shock to fandom: a jarring departure from Return of the Jedi, with beloved characters enmeshed in deep relationships, confronting the highest of stakes with smiles, hugs, and charm. But if we had been paying attention to Lucasfilm’s preceding productions, we would have seen the groundwork laid for exactly the type of film we got: a history, stubborn, idiosyncratic, and peculiar.

We would, at least, have been less surprised to read…

Turmoil has engulfed the Galactic Republic. The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute.