Star Wars Kid parody on Arrested Development

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star wars kid

Ghyslain Raza (born 1988) became widely known on the Internet in May 2003 as the "Star Wars kid" when a video clip he recorded of himself was leaked online. At the time of his celebrity as an internet phenomenon, he was a high school student in Trois-Rivieres, Quebec. more...

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Incident

On November 4, 2002 Raza made a video of himself swinging a golf ball retriever around as if it were a weapon. Most believe he was imitating the Star Wars character Darth Maul with a double-bladed lightsaber, though others believe he was imitating the character Kilik from the game Soul Calibur wielding a bo. The video was filmed at the studio of his high school, and the tape was left forgotten in a basement for a few months. On or around April 19, 2003, the original owner of the videotape discovered Raza's 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 Raza's 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. 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 over 900 million internet users have viewed a version of the original video making it the most popular "viral video" on the Internet.

Embarrassment

Raza reportedly suffered considerable embarrassment, in part because the video showed him to be overweight and not particularly graceful. The case raised privacy issues and was extensively reported in mainstream news media worldwide, including The New York Times, CBS News and BBC News. The boy underwent therapy and counseling. Raza became the spokesperson for an anti-bullying campaign in Ontario, but later changed his mind and the program was taken down.

An Internet petition to get Raza 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 Raza 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 Raza an Apple iPod. In less than a week, they raised over $3,200 and shipped him a 30GB iPod and a $2,600 gift certificate.