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Revision as of 06:22, 20 May 2007

"Star Wars kid" is an Internet phenomenon which started when a video clip recorded by a fourteen-year-old Quebecois male high school student was leaked online.

Incident

On November 4, 2002 the boy made a video of himself swinging a golf ball retriever around as a weapon, imitating the Darth Maul character from Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace wielding a double-bladed lightsaber. The video was filmed at the studio of his high school, and the tape was left forgotten in a basement, the original owner of the videotape discovered his recorded acts and immediately shared it with some friends. Thinking that it would be a funny prank, they encoded it to a WMV file and shared it using the Kazaa peer-to-peer file sharing network under the filename Jackass_starwars_funny.wmv.

Within two weeks, the file was downloaded several million times. An adapted version of the video was created, adding Star Wars music, texts, and lightsaber lights and sounds to his golf ball retriever. According to Waxy.org, this was done by Bryan Dube, an employee from Raven Software. Several gaming, technology and Star Wars-related sites began to host the video, further increasing downloads. Days later a second "Matrix Reloaded" version hit the internet. Soon, people all over the world picked up the original and began making conversions of it, adding music, visual effects, and sounds, combining it with other well-known videos or scenes from films.

As of 27th November 2006 it has been estimated by The Viral Factory that the videos had been viewed over 900 million times, making it the most popular "viral video" on the Internet. Thanks to the creation of YouTube it may have been seen almost a Billion times.

Embarrassment

The young boy reportedly suffered considerable embarrassment, in part because the video showed him to be overweight and not particularly graceful. Additional scorn was directed at his self-generated sound effects. The case raised privacy issues and was extensively reported in mainstream news media worldwide, including The New York Times, CBS News, GMTV and BBC News. The boy underwent therapy and counseling.

An Internet petition to get him a cameo role in Star Wars Episode III received more than 178,000 digital signatures. Although George Lucas sympathized with the young man's plight, the film contains no such cameo and there were never any plans known to do so, nor is it at all clear that he himself would have wished it. At the height of the video's popularity, two webloggers (waxy.org and jish.nu) began a fundraiser to buy the boy an Apple iPod. In less than a week, they raised over $3,200 and shipped him a 30GB iPod certificate.

Lawsuit

In July 2003, his family filed a CA$250,000 ($229,716) lawsuit against the families of four of his schoolmates. Legal proceedings against one family were quickly dropped. The three remaining defendants were alleged to have taken general public because of the video. The lawsuit had been scheduled to begin trial on April 10, 2006; but on April 7, the boy and his parents reached an out-of-court settlement with the defendants. The settlement's terms were not announced, but were believed to be in the $150,000 range. Previous court proceedings had included discussions about whether the defendants had liability insurance. In 2006 the boy finally came to terms with his classmates and received CA$300,000 ($275,659.20) in a lawsuit between three of the four classmates. (Associated Sun Press)

Cultural references

  • The 2004 video game Tony Hawk's Underground 2 featured three references to Star Wars Kid. In the Boston level, an overweight child with glasses can be found inside an apartment; the player can approach him and make him dance around and make whooshing noises as which he can be seen standing atop an operating table fending off alien doctors. As the player progresses through the game, the boy can even be unlocked as a playable character.
  • The 2004 video game World of Warcraft featured a boss character named Lord Valthalak whose attack animation mimicked Star Wars Kid's movements from the video.
  • In 2004 on the TV show Ed, the character Mark Vanacore makes a video of himself trying out new walks with the school video camera, then forgets the tape in the camera, which is found and released on the Internet, with results very similar to the Star Wars Kid video.
  • In an episode of Unscrewed, Martin Sargent performed his own rendition of the Star Wars kid and told viewers to take the broom and turn it into a lightsaber. He stated that the Star Wars kid was ungrateful that the Internet made him famous and that he wished he could become famous by simply swinging around a broom.
  • The 4th episode of Dark Oracle ("Paintball Wizard") has a main plotline involving the character Lance getting accidentally videotaped while privately play-acting in his underwear as an axe-wielding barbarian, and subsequently being humiliated in front of the entire school when the tape is discovered and publicly displayed there.
File:Arrested Development - Star Wars Kid.jpg
Star Wars Kid parody on Arrested Development
  • In 2005, a first season episode of Veronica Mars called "M.A.D." involved a girl blackmailed into staying in a relationship in exchange for not releasing an embarrassing video of her. She says she does not want to become a national joke like the "Star Wars Kid."
  • In 2005, the TV series Arrested Development depicted George Michael the middle of a family video. Bluth's video is later seen four more times in the series: once in a high school election video in "The Immaculate Election", leading to his reconciling with his ex-girlfriend, a second time by the FBI, who mistake it for a terrorist training video in '"Sword of Destiny," a third time at a fundraiser for the family in the episode "Prison Break-In," and a fourth time when he uses it to tape his dad's girlfriend Rita eating fake fruit in the episode "The Ocean Walker." Bluth wearily suggests they should get a new tape as "they're not that expensive".
  • In 2005, the Swedish TV-series 100 höjdare (100 Highlights) ranked the Star Wars Kid video clip as the 60th funniest moment in the world.
  • In 2005, CNET listed the Star Wars Kid as #8 on its Top 10 Web Fads list.
  • In 2005, an episode of American Dad titled "All About Steve" has main character Stan Smith fighting a crowd of angry geeks at a sci-fi convention. In the midst of the battle, Star Wars Kid steps out of the crowd and attempts to "attack" Stan, in a sequence mimicking the video. The "fight" ends when Star Wars Kid loses his balance and falls over. ThatVideoSite.com has a video clip showing this sci-fi convention scene.
  • In 2005, an episode of the animated series Teen Titans titled "For Real" featured a brief sequence in which a geek-stereotype villain named Control Freak clumsily swings a double-bladed lightsaber. The scene features an innocuous piece of fabric in the background and an identical camera angle to the original Star Wars Kid video. The stateside production team even sent a copy of the original Star Wars Kid video to the Korean studios where the program is animated.
  • In his May 5 2006 story on topgear.com, motoring journalist Jeremy Clarkson, commenting on "downloadable TV," mentioned that the only thing available would be "that fat kid pretending to be a Jedi knight with a floor mop. And a bit of happy slapping."
  • On the March 28, 2007 episode of Countdown with Keith Olbermann the Star Wars kid was one of the eligible contestants in the "Internet Superstar (Not Porn)" contest.
  • In a 2007 episode of Celebrity Deathmatch, claymations were embarrassed after a video of him called Nick Diamond Jedi Master, is leaked into the internet. The video showed Nick practicing his Jedi skills the same way as The Star Wars Kid.
  • In 2007, a homemade video created by Mason Powell of Stoneworker Pictures was posted on YouTube. The video is played to the hitmiddle of the video, the Star Wars Kid (Attack of the Clones edition) is featured, paying homeage to Star Wars Kid.
  • In 2007, in a TV commercial to promote their web site, the Dallas Stars used a short clip of the Star Wars Kid at the beginning of the commercial with a voice saying "You never know what you can find on the internet".
  • On May 19, 2007 a video appeard on Ebaumsworld in which he appears as a hologram in the scene where Obi-Wan first sees R2-D2's holographic message in his house.

Notes and references

  1. Lampert, (Allison March 29, 2006). "High school was time of torment". The Gazette.
  2. Ha, Tu Thanh (July 4, 2006). 'Star Wars Kid' cuts a deal with his tormentors". The Globe and Mail.
  3. Adler, Heather (August 24, 2006). "Stephen Colbert Aims His Lightsaber at Star Wars". DOSE.
  4. "Weird Al" Yankovic (2006), White & Nerdy music video, Volcano Records

See also

External links

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