Star Wars Kid

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Ghyslain Raza (born circa 1988), from Trois-Rivières, Quebec, Canada, became known throughout the Internet in May 2003 as the "Star Wars Kid" when a stolen video of him was leaked online.

File:Swk.jpg
Artist depiction of SWK

The video

On November 8, 2002 Raza made a video of himself acting like the Star Wars character Darth Maul, using a golf ball retriever to represent his lightsaber. It was filmed at the studio of Séminaire St-Joseph high school. The cassette was left in a studio for a few months. On or around April 19, 2003, the original owner of the tape discovered Ghyslain's recorded acts and immediately shared it with some friends. Thinking that it would be a very funny prank, they encoded it to a WMV file and shared it using the Kazaa peer-to-peer file sharing network, calling the videofile 'Jackass_starwars_funny.wmv'.

Within two weeks, the file was being downloaded worldwide. An adapted version of the video was created, adding Star Wars music, texts, and lightsaber lights and sounds to Ghyslain'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, which caused the video to be downloaded more and more. 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, for comic effect.

Raza reportedly suffered considerable embarrassment, in part because the video showed him to be neither particularly athletic nor 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.

An Internet petition to get Raza a cameo role in Star Wars Episode III received more than 140,000 digital signatures. Although George Lucas sympathized with the young man's plight, the film contains no such cameo and there were never any plans to do so[citation needed], 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 Ghyslain 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.

The lawsuit

In July 2003, his family filed a CDN$250,000 lawsuit against the families of the schoolmates — Michaël Caron, Jérôme Laflamme, and Jean-Michel Rheault (charges against François Labarre have been dropped) — who allegedly took the video and put it on the Internet without Raza's consent. The family claimed that Raza had suffered harassment and derision from both his schoolmates and the general public because of the video. The lawsuit stated that he had dropped out of school and had finished his school year at the Pavillon Arc-en-ciel child psychiatry ward at the Trois-Rivières Regional Hospital Centre, and quoted Internet chat transcripts among the four defendants as demonstrating lack of remorse. The transcript of an interview done by the technology columnist Bruno Guglielminetti from Radio-Canada (in French) with Ghyslain's lawyer at the time (François Vigeant) can be found here.

The lawsuit was expected to go to trial April 10, 2006, but on April 7, news came out that Raza and his parents reached an out-of-court settlement with the families of three former schoolmates they had sued for damages. Terms of the settlement were not announced, but previous proceedings included discussions about whether the defendants had liability insurance.

Cultural references

In 2004, an episode of Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends featured a story entitled World Wide Wabbit, which may have been based on this incident. Unlike Ghyslain Raza, the character caught on tape actually benefited from it by creating awareness of the foster home.

In 2004, on the animated series The Venture Brothers which airs on Cartoon Network Adult Swim line up, there is an episode entitled, "Tag Sale -- You're It" in which a stout, overweight henchman finds a lightsaber-esque device at a garage sale and proceeds to try to fight with it, his moves being drawn to mimic Ghyslain's in the video.

In 2004, the video game Tony Hawk's Underground 2 featured three references to Ghyslain Raza. In the Boston level, an overweight kid with glasses can be found inside an apartment; the player can approach him and make him dance around and make wooshing noises as Star Wars like music plays in the background. He can also be found in the hidden area of the Triangle level in which he can be seen standing atop an operating table fending off alien doctors. And as the player progresses through the game, the boy can even be unlocked as a playable character.

In 2004, the TV network G4 featured Dave Navarro in a spoof of the Star Wars Kid on their annual awards show G-Phoria.

File:Arrested Development - Star Wars Kid.jpg
Star Wars Kid parody on Arrested Development

In 2005, the TV-series Arrested Development had George Michael's lightsaber moves in the middle of a family video. Buster is also shown doing lightsaber moves. George Michael's video is seen four more times in the series: once in a high school election video, leading to his reconciling with his ex-girlfriend, a second time at a fundraiser for the family in the episode Prison Break-In, a third time by the FBI, who mistake it for a terrorist training video in Sword of Destiny, and a fourth time when he uses it to tape his dad's girlfriend Rita eating fake fruit in the episode The Ocean Walker. George Michael wearily suggests they should get a new tape because "they're not expensive".

In 2005, the Swedish TV-series 100 höjdare (100 Highlights) ranked Raza's video clip as the 60th funniest moment in the world.

In 2005, the TV-series Veronica Mars featured a reference to the Star Wars kid. In the episode "M.A.D." a character states that she fears a sexually explicit video of herself will be posted online, turning her into an internet joke similar to "Paris Hilton or that Star Wars kid."

In 2005, the San Francisco Giants, when playing at AT&T Park, played a video of the Star Wars Kid on the Jumbotron alongside the away team pitcher whenever the catcher and coach come out for a meeting on the pitcher's mound.

In 2005, C|Net lists the Star Wars Kid as #8 on its Top 10 Web Fads list.

In 2005, the TV-series American Dad, in the episode "All About Steve", has main character Stan fighting a crowd of angry geeks at a sci-fi convention. In the midst of the battle, Ghyslain steps out of the crowd and attempts to "attack" Stan, in a sequence mimicking the video. The "fight" ends when Ghyslain loses his balance and falls over. Putfile has a long video clip showing this sci-fi convention scene.

In 2005, the animated series Teen Titans had an episode entitled "For Real" which featured a brief sequence in which a geek-stereotype villain named Control Freak clumsily swings a double-ended lightsaber. The scene features an innocuous piece of fabric in the background and an identical camera angle to the original Ghyslain Raza 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 2005, MAD Magazine made a brief reference to the Star Wars Kid. A section of the October 2005 issue details the pros and cons of new media releases, and for the Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith DVD, the MAD writers lament that "The only special video we were really looking forward to was that one with the fat kid having the lightsaber battle all by himself."

In 2005, "Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide" on Nickelodeon showed a boy swinging a mop around and acting like the Star Wars Kid.

See also

References

External links

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