(Jar Jar) seems to owe something to Disney characters. If you go back and look at cartoons from the '30s and the '40s and the '50s, they're full of racism. And it's deliberate. And Dumbo, the black crows, were meant to remind you of black people,

Walt Disney was a master of the human psychology. His sense of timing, sense of speed. In a sense, those cartoons are like Rorschach tests.

The leader of Jar Jar's tribe is a fat, bumbling buffoon with a rumbling voice, and he seems to be a caricature of a stereotypical African tribal chieftain.

It's a cultural phenomenon. So, saying it's a cartoon doesn't dismiss it, doesn't denigrate it, it even makes it more powerful. Because why? Now it's getting into the unconscious or the subconscious and the minds of our children.

We'd actually met him once when he was at Cambridge. Then Terry Gilliam came along and started doing cartoons in the last series. We knew of John (Cleese) and Graham (Chapman) and what they were doing. They were doing a thing called 'The Last 1948 Show.' So it was really 'Don't Adjust Your Set' gets together with 'The Last 1948 Show'... John wanted to work with Mike Palin. At that time we decided not to do another series of 'Don't Adjust Your Set,' and we all came in the package: Mike and me and Eric and Terry Gilliam. We said, 'Let's all do it together.' We all liked what each other did.

He is like the sheep dog in the cartoons, ... Guarding the goats is his job and that is all he cares about. He doesn't want to lick you on the hand; he just wants to be left alone to do his job.