The Force Awakens’s plot is being held under the usual wraps, as are other crucial details, including its budget. (The costume designer, Michael Kaplan, refused even to say whether Princess Leia’s side buns would return, though Fisher subsequently let slip at a fan convention that the buns are out.) But here is something I can disclose, which I suspect fans—a majority of them, anyway—will find most heartening of all: at one point during the effects review, while watching a sequence with spaceships flying low over a desert planet, Abrams asked to pause the scene. With a light pen, he drew a little squiggle on a sand dune.

“I have a thought about putting Jar Jar Binks’s bones in the desert there,” he said.

Everyone laughed.

Abrams laughed, too, but insisted, “I’m serious!” He pointed out that the shot zips by in a second, if that. “Only three people will notice,” he said, “but they’ll love it.”

If you don’t already know who Luke Skywalker is or why people would like to see Jar Jar Binks dead, you are probably not bothering to read this. But just in case, a primer:

Luke is the hero of the first three Star Wars films—the original Star Wars, since retitled A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi—released between 1977 and 1983 and now known as episodes IV, V, and VI. In that last one, Luke and his rebel comrades defeat the evil Galactic Empire, and Luke redeems arch-villain Darth Vader, who, as we learned in a famous plot twist from The Empire Strikes Back, is really Luke’s father—a good guy named Anakin Skywalker before he turned into a bad guy. He is the hero, or antihero, of episodes I, II, and III, the prequels released between 1999 and 2005: The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith, which together recount the rise of the Empire and the reasons Anakin became Darth Vader, or vice versa (as die-hard fans of the original trilogy may prefer to think of it, narrative chronology be damned).

Jar Jar Binks is peripheral to this family drama, but—and per Abrams’s brainstorm—he is inarguably the most reviled character in the Star Wars saga, a cartoonish, amphibian-like alien with a shuffling gait, prone to pratfalls and boggle-eyed reaction shots, and voiced in a patois with a Jamaican lilt, all of which prompted some critics to condemn the character as a racist stereotype. Introduced in The Phantom Menace, Jar Jar has come to symbolize what many fans see as the faults of the prequel trilogy: characters no one much cares about; a sense of humor geared toward the youngest conceivable audience members; an over-reliance on computer graphics; and story lines devoted to the kinds of convoluted political machinations which wouldn’t have been out of place in adaptations of I, Claudius or The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, but which fit less snugly in films with characters like Jar Jar Binks. Sometimes it was hard to know who George Lucas had made those films for, other than himself. (It should be noted, however, that he has a sense of humor about Jar Jar: a fan-created statue of the creature stands in one of the lobbies at Lucasfilm. On the wall next to it, taped up at Lucas’s behest, is a small printout of a British Internet poll in which Jar Jar was voted “the most annoying film character of all time,” beating out Mr. Bean, Ace Ventura, and—who knew?—Andie MacDowell’s heroine from Four Weddings and a Funeral.)

A Long Time Ago . . .

What people sometimes forget about the first Star Wars was that when it hit theaters, in 1977, it was startling not just for its revolutionary special effects but also for its unabashed sense of fun. After 10 years of haunted, pessimistic, even nihilistic hits such as Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider, The French Connection, The Godfather, Chinatown, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Network, and Taxi Driver—films in which more often than not the heroes, such as they were, ended up compromised, defeated, or dead—there was something radical about a movie where the good guys win an unambiguous, bell-ringing victory, and receive medals in the final scene to boot. As Time put it in a big 1977 feature about Lucas and Star Wars, “It was a weird idea to make a movie whose only purpose was to give pleasure.” According to the magazine, Lucas’s skeptical peers had urged him to make “a deep picture, one that had meaning, significance and recondite symbolism.” Ha-ha, those film snobs. But, ironically, as Lucas over the years grew to take his saga and perhaps himself more seriously—people have written book after book exploring his really pretty simple ideas about good and evil, mythology, archetypes, and blah blah blah—“recondite” is where he ended up; what was organic and maybe even intuitive in the first film was increasingly foregrounded, skeleton turned into exoskeleton.

A colorful array of galactic travelers, smugglers, and other assorted riffraff fill the main hall of pirate Maz Kanata’s castle. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.

That was the backstory—the longer, real-life version of a Star Wars movie’s serial-style opening crawl—in 2012, when George Lucas, then 67 and pondering retirement, brought the producer Kathleen Kennedy into his company and sold it to Disney that October, stepping down while Kennedy stayed on as president. Whatever post-Lucasfilm projects he was looking forward to, including launching a museum devoted to narrative art and starting a new family—he married Mellody Hobson, president of a Chicago money-management firm, in June 2013, and the couple had a daughter, Everest, later that year (he also has three adult children)—Lucas may have been motivated to sell in part by the sometimes harsh reactions to his more recent movies. The prequels made piles of money, but the griping about them rubbed him a bit raw. “It was fine before the Internet,” he told Bloomberg Businessweek following the Lucasfilm sale. “But now . . . it’s gotten very vicious and very personal. You just say, ‘Why do I need to do this?’ ” One could argue that billionaire movie moguls should have tougher hides, but most of them don’t have to deal with critiques such as “George Lucas raped my childhood,” which has become an unfortunate fanboy catchphrase. There is even a 2010 documentary on this subject, an essay in disenchantment and misplaced possessiveness titled The People vs. George Lucas.