Star Wars Kid
From FamousPicturesMagazine
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| Picture Taken On: November 8, 2002 |
Place: Le Seminaire St-Joseph de in Trois-Rivières, Quebec, Canada |
Behind the Camera: Ghyslain Raza |
Picture Summary: Ghyslain Raza fighting like a Sith Warrior. |
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| First Posted: Last Updated on 2010-6-26 by Dean Lucas |
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Seminaire St-Joseph de Trois-Rivieres, Quebec, Canada decided to take advantage of his school’s recording studio. Imitating the Darth Maul character from Star Wars he jumped, danced and twirled around the studio using a tennis ball retriever in place of Darth Maul’s double-edged light saber. Chubby Ghyslain and his less than graceful moves were recorded and apparently forgotten for months. Then in April 2003, students at Ghyslain’s school (Michaël Caron, Jérôme Laflamme and Jean-Michel Rheault) found the recording and quickly began sharing it with their friends with the file name, 'Jackass_starwars_funny.wmv'. It ended up on the p2p program Kazaa and weblogs started to host the video. Not long after, millions around the world were downloading the video. In Nov 2006 the Viral marketing company, The Viral Factory, collated page impression figures from websites such as YouTube and Google Videos. They determined that this video as of Nov 2006 had been viewed 900 million times.(Click to see the Top 10 Viral videos)
Students put the video online
In the Court transcripts from a lawsuit the Raza family filed, it revealed Jérôme Laflamme had discovered the tape when we took the equipment to film a varsity football game. Laflamme showed the tape to Jean-Michel Rheault who then copied it. "All I did was take the cassette, digitize it on the studio computer to pull a joke on Ghyslain. After that, I had nothing to do with it," Rheault would later say. The third defendant who claims not to know the other two somehow came across a copy of the video and created a website to post the video online. All three in the run up to the lawsuit denied that they where responsible with Rheault claiming, "It's no fun what happened here, but that's the problem with the Internet. Things travel fast."
The video first appeared on the Internet on the evening of April 14, 2003 but quickly spread the globe. The video was so popular and so widely circulated that sites hosting the video where recording millions of downloads. One website solely dedicated to the Star Wars Kid video recorded 76 million hits by October, 2004. The video itself might have died away but soon people where adding effects and editing the video to make new versions. Some special effects people like Bryan Dube, an employee from Raven Software added Star War’s effects, music and opening sequences. Several versions where made with various themes but the most well liked involved Star War effects, although a matrix version was heavily downloaded. The Star Wars Kid fame soon spilled over into merchandising and T-shirts, mugs and other paraphernalia that are still are available online.
While the video traveled through the internet with people laughing at
Raza, many others identified with him as they remembered their own
awkward high school years. As the clip’s popularity increased, web
bloggers, waxy.org and jish.nu, where able to track down Ghyslain.
Jish Mukerji from jish.nu was able to get this short interview
(translated from French):
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Interview
| People were laughing at me, … it was not funny at all | 
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| —Ghyslain Raza | ||
Jish: Ghyslain?
Yes.
My name's Jish and I am calling you from San Francisco, California and
I'd like to interview you. Do you speak English too?
Only a little bit.
Well, I'll try to speak in French, but I'll apologize in advance since
my French isn't perfect.
Oh, that's ok.
The interview is concerning your martial arts video.
Mm hmm.
Did you know that over 500,000 people have viewed your video?
Yes, I know.
When you made the video, did you think this many people would be viewing it?
No, I really never anticipated that.
How did the video end up on the web?
Actually, it was a mistake. The cassette was left in the studio and
someone put it on the Internet.
Then, I guess it wasn't a friend who did this, more of an enemy?
More or less. It was someone I knew.
I only have a few more questions... There was something yellow on the
floor in your video, what was that?
It was probably something left behind in the studio from a previous
session. I really don't remember what it was.
Some people have taken your video and have added some Star Wars
special effects, have you seen these?
Yes, I have seen some.
What's your opinion of these videos?
From what I saw, they look very well-made. It's surprising to see what
people have done with a video that wasn't meant to be seen. It's
interesting.
Do you have a website?
Personally, no.
What are your favorite sites?
I'm really into computers/computing, so my favourite sites are the
ones from the different companies involved... Nothing that I visit
regularly.
Do you also read weblogs?
No.
We know that you have a laptop, cell phone, Palm and other gadgets
like that. Do you have any other favorite gadgets that you would like
to buy, perhaps something like an iPod?
For the moment, I don't have plans to buy any gadgets, but sometime
soon I'd like to get an iPod.
Do you use a Mac or a PC?
At home, I use a PC, but I really like the world of Macintosh. It's
what I use at school.
If you bought an iPod, would you get the PC or Mac version?
Probably, I'd get the PC version.
Well, thank you very much and good night.
Good night.
They also started an online campaign to raise money to get him an
ipod. Thousands donated money and eventually a 30GB IPOD was in the
mail to the Raza household along with $3600 in gift certificates for
the Canadian electronic superstore, Future Shop. While Ghyslain said
it was nice that something did come out of his experience he would
have preferred that millions had not seen the video, which he had
meant to be private. "People were laughing at me, … it was not funny
at all."
Psyc Hospital stay
In fact Ghyslain was tormented at school and became so despondent over the whole episode that he dropped out and got a private tutor even spending some time at the Pavillon Arc-en-ciel child psychiatry ward at the Trois-Rivières Regional Hospital Centre. He would later recall how other students would jump onto tables and make fun of him. "There was about 100 people in those halls. It was total chaos . . . Any opportunity was good enough to shout 'Star Wars!' "
Lawsuit
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| we are deeply saddened by the current situation ... |
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| —Lucasfilm | ||
In 2003 the Raza family filed a lawsuit against four students who had encoded and spread the video. (Charges where dropped against François Labarre because of lack of evidence) The lawsuit was finally scheduled to go to courts in April 2006 with the Raza family seeking $351,000 in damages. However, days before case was due to go in front of the judge, an out of court settlement was reached for an undisclosed amount.
Star Wars Part
The negative effects of the video’s popularity is cited as one of the reasons George Lucas, the Star Wars creator resisted a huge online petition to give Raza a bit part in the third and final installment of Star Wars. An online petition to do just that collected almost 150,000 signatures, which attracted the attention of mainstream media. In a BBC interview, Lucasfilm was quoted as saying "Obviously there has been a tremendous show of support for Ghyslain with tens of thousands of fans rallying around him … However, we are deeply saddened by the current situation and any difficulties this unwanted publicity might be causing him and his family." Needless to say he didn’t get the part.
