27 Years Ago, The Last True Star Wars Masterpiece Arrived a Month After Phantom Menace
Soon I’m gonna be a jedi…
Ever since Return of the Jedi, everything related to Star Wars has been “pretty good” at best. The prequel trilogy seemed aimed at a younger demographic than the original trilogy, and Disney’s sequel trilogy started strong but ultimately collapsed in on itself due to both corporate and fan pressure. The Mandalorian was good for only part of its run and the same goes for The Clone Wars. (I’ll admit I haven't watched Andor, though I hear good things.)
From my perspective, only Star Wars project that has risen to the level of “masterpiece” in the past four decades, and that’s Weird Al Yankovic’s brilliant Star Wars parody, “The Saga Begins.” So when he performed it recently as part of a 23-minute recorded set for NPR's Tiny Desk series, it was a brutal reminder that Lucasfilm still hasn't managed to produce anything at this level in the 27 years since its initial release.
A perfect Star Wars parody
Like most of Weird Al’s best work, “The Saga Begins” is a direct parody of a beloved song rewritten to lampoon something else entirely, not the original song itself. In this case, Weird Al mocked Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace by rewriting Don McLean’s 1971 masterpiece “American Pie.” The original folk rock song ran over eight minutes long and was largely about “the day the music died,” which is the term used to describe February 3, 1959, the day rock stars Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper, and Ritchie Valens died together in a plane crash. Historically, this is considered the end of the early period of rock and roll music. McLean’s song is about how American culture changed as a result.
In contrast, Weird Al’s song makes a rare mainstream musical reference to Jar Jar Binks.
“The Saga Begins,” which runs ‘only’ five and a half minutes, is basically just a summary of The Phantom Menace. It begins with only a slight rewrite of McLean’s opening lyric, which one has to imagine is where Yankovic first got the idea of combining these two elements. “American Pie” opens “A long, long time ago, I can still remember…” while Yankovic’s song begins with “A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far away…” From there, Yankovic rattles through the events of the movie, all from the perspective of Obi-Wan Kenobi.
There are lyrics like this one, which describes the opening scene:
“Naboo was under an attack And I thought me and Qui-Gon Jinn Could talk the Federation into Maybe cutting them a little slack But their response, it didn't thrill us They locked the doors and tried to kill us.”
“Naboo was under an attack
And I thought me and Qui-Gon Jinn
Could talk the Federation into
Maybe cutting them a little slack
But their response, it didn't thrill us
They locked the doors and tried to kill us.”
There are also lines like “Well, I know he built C-3PO/And I've heard how fast his pod can go,” and “So we took him there and we told the tale/How his midichlorians were off the scale.”
There are some directly funny lyrics in the song, like when Qui-Gon Jinn tells Yoda “Just stick it in your pointy ear.” But for the most part, the song just plainly states the events of the film and the absurdity of the movie becomes clear just by explaining it. Like, “Ah, do you see him hitting on the queen/Though he's just nine and she's 14?” and later, when describing the final battle, the lyrics go, “A lot of folks were croakin'/The battle droids were broken.”
The chorus, as is often the case with Yankovic’s music, is where he really shines. McLean’s original chorus began with slight variations of “We were singin' bye-bye, Miss American Pie
Drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry.” With that, Weird Al created, “Oh my, my, this here Anakin guy/May be Vader someday later, now he's just a small fry,” which is easily the song’s most memorable lyric.
It also has a pretty great music video featuring Weird Al as Obi-Wan in the Mos Eisley Cantina.
The saga behind Weird Al's "The Saga Begins"
As impressive as the song is, it becomes all the more outstanding when you find out how it was made. “The Saga Begins” came out on June 24, 1999, just five weeks after the release of The Phantom Menace. The parody was incredibly timely and accurate to the film, which is remarkable given the fact that it was recorded on April 30, 1999, three weeks before the movie came out. And, as Yankovic has explained in interviews, he was not permitted to see any early version of the film. Instead, he wrote the entire song from online rumors and what was in the trailers and just happened to end up entirely right.
The song quickly became beloved by the Star Wars fandom, which had also embraced Yankovic's 1985 song “Yoda” (another banger, which is a parody of “Lola” by the Kinks). Among the fans of “The Saga Begins” is also Don McLean, who told Billboard, “When I heard his version, I thought it was better than the original." George Lucas loves the song too. According to Yankovic, when he sent it to Lucasfilm for Lucas’ approval, the reply from the studio was, “You should have seen the smile on George's face.”
The song is so good that I’ll admit that it makes me want similar songs for other so-so Star Wars movies. Just imagine what Weird Al could do with a parody of any of the sequel trilogy films or the immensely underwhelming Solo or The Mandalorian and Grogu. We’ll probably never get such a song, though, since Weird Al is a true artist who probably doesn't want to just repeat the same things he’s done before, which is more than what can be said about basically everything that has come out of Star Wars for decades.
Except, of course, Andor, which I promise I’ll be getting to.