When is a movie not just a movie?

I'm sure the STAR WARS fans are lining up to beat on Mr. Lucas over this nonsense. He's hardly avoiding ethnic stereotyping, so maybe it's all just some ghastly PR joke meant to serve as a slap in the face of people who believe they can precisely place the German--er, Asian accents of the Dutch--er, Asian stereotyped Neimoidians. Personally, I expect Watto to come back in episode II so that when Obi-wan stops to ask directions he can say, "You see that big tree way thou yonder near the yard with the tires up front, and how the road veers around the bend just beyond that and sort of straddles the hill over into the next valley? Well, you don't wanna go that way...." [You'd have to have grown up in the South to understand the joke, I guess.] So, all this talk of racism in "Star Wars" brings to mind "The Lord of the Rings". Yes, there are people who think the book is racist. Tolkien -- a man who grew up an orphan under the guardianship of a strict Catholic priest -- is perceived by some people as staunchly racist, "he was a man of his times" they say. His "times" was the 20th century, and he lived through 2 world wars and the 1960s. His first memory of Christmas was of "blazing sun, drawn curtains and a drooping eucalyptus" (Letters, No. 163). According to Tolkien's biographer, the young Ronald was bitten by a tarantula and his nurse sucked out the poison, but all Tolkien remembered of the event was running through the long grass. Some people's ideas to the contrary, Tolkien doesn't seem to have been much impacted by his experience in South Africa. He left when he was three years old, hardly the age when people start tramping upon the downtrodden masses in the wake of their parents' racism. The most vivid imagery in Tolkien's stories which evoke anything of his memories are "the heats of the south" with reference to where a potent wine was made in "Lay of Leithian" and the huge, deadly spiders, though Humphrey Carpenter says that Tolkien didn't actually recall the tarantula. Nonetheless, some people dare claim that Tolkien was traumatized by an incident where a family servant took him off to visit some relatives one day. Tolkien never mentioned the event in any of his letters. He was more profoundly affected by the death of

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