Saturday, June 25, 2005

A Geek from the Past

I was trading funny web-videos today with a guy at work and I stumbled across one I haven’t seen in a long while. Have any of you seen “Star Wars Kid”? Here’s the premise; this kid, who I guess was in the A/V club at his high school, films himself doing some staff fighting moves with his own light saber sounds while no one is around. The kid is dressed kinda lame, he is a little chunky and he sucks to say the least. The kicker is that he left the tape in the camera. The next day some other A/V kids find the tape and made the fateful decision to put it on KaZaA for all to see. The video takes off like a rocket. In days there are about five, professional quality, downloadable versions of this poor kid. I had it on my computer video file for years. Every time I watch it I keep repeating under my breath, “You poor, poor bastard.”

When I did a yahoo search today with the words Star Wars Kid I got a huge return. There is page after page dedicated to this video. It has become an underground Internet cult phenomenon. There are roughly 108 videos edits now available and at least one more a day is made somewhere. There are T-shirts and bumper stickers. There was even a petition made up to get George Lucas to put him in the last Star Wars movie. I was flat amazed. I remembered downloading the original video in 2002 (the same year it was made) but I had no idea at the time that it would turn into such a huge thing. I have to admit I was halfway tempted to buy a shirt, but I think that may be too geeky even for me. All I can say is, God speed Star Wars Kid…God speed.

3 comments:

bobo said...

Man, I saw that when it came out and my heart went out to the poor guy. The web video trend is amazing, once something is on film and starts spreading it is unreal how quickly it can grow.

Singularity said...

Like none of you people have ever video taped a discrete moment and forgot about the tape and lets just say hypothetically that your brother found the tape and put it on his website and then your never allowed back to church ever again...I'm just saying.

cj said...

I feel I must make two comments..
1. P.T. Barnum was right, and I'm not referring to the kid who was genuinely using his imagination to have some fun
2. Don't people have ANY imagination anymore that this is the best they can do is create t-shirts or bumperstickers for such a non-event? Just think what we could accomplish if people spent those futile efforts on doing something to benefit their community or to better themselves in some way or to relate to their own family.