Not longer after the new Star Wars movie was released, there was talk of racial stereotyping. To wit:

The Neimoidians--Stock Asian villains, using Hollywood Oriental accents, one of whom dresses in garb suspiciously like that of a Catholic bishop.

Watto, the fat winged junk dealer--A crooked Middle Eastern merchant, Jew or Arab, take your pick.

Jar Jar Binks, the dumb, scaredy-cat computer-generated figure--Described as a cross between Butterfly McQueen and Stepin Fetchit.

There are more, but you get the picture.

Of course, if you examine any movie, or any piece of literature, for that matter, you can always find a stereotype or infer one. So what?

As is almost always the case, any attempt to explain human behavior by looking for a complicated sinister motive will be wrong. There is a simpler explanation: Lack of creativity, and laziness.

What, you say? Lack of creativity by the great George Lucas? I'm afraid so. Let's be honest. The original Star Wars (1977) was nothing more than Flash Gordon with a large budget and modern special effects. It could have died at the box office, but coming as it did at the end of one of the worst winters of the century (as did "Roots"), with a public unusually hungry for entertainment, it scored big time.

Here's what Vincent Canby of the New York Times said at the time:

"The story of Star Wars could be written on the head of a pin and still leave room for the Bible. It is, rather, a breathless succession of escapes, pursuits, dangerous missions, unexpected encounters, with each one ending in some kind of defeat until the final one."

In Hollywood, nothing succeeds like success. That's why "Silence of the Lambs" (1991), which was really a grade Z slasher pic with a big budget and name cast, won Oscars for best actor, best actress, best director, best picture, and best writing (screenplay based on material from another medium).

If you're George Lucas, 22 years later after the Star Wars series has begun, knowing that whatever you turn out will be a gigantic money maker, why should you care? You were having too much fun playing with all the special effects.

There was much more wrong with "The Phantom Menace" than the phony spectre of crypto-racism, as perceived by a bunch of inane victicrats.

If Anakin Skywalker was the chosen one, why didn't the Jedi leadership accept him? Was it better to turn him away because he was "too old" so that he could instead become Darth Vader with the Dark Side of the Force?

And what is this "Dark Side" anyway? The most likely analogy would be in contrasting the Church with Satanism, a revolutionary movement against the Church. Today, as in the twelfth century when it began, Satanists hold to a so-called Manichaean view of the universe. That is, there are ultimately two creative principals in the universe, one good and the other evil.

In practice, Manichaeism denies human responsibility for the evil that one does, on the premise that it is not due to one's free will, but to the dominance of Satan's power in one's life.

Aha!! So, if you do evil, it's not your fault. You're a victim of Satan... which brings us back to the poor targets victimized by the stereotypes in the movie.

It wasn't Lucas' fault. The Devil made him do it.