How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise

by Taylor, Chris

  Raza was also in the school AV club. So one day he grabbed a golf ball retriever, took a VHS tape with an old basketball game on it, and decided to record his lightsaber moves. The retriever was too long to act as anything other than a double-headed lightsaber, of the kind that martial arts expert Ray Park wields as Darth Maul in Episode I—very advanced moves, in other words. Raza didn’t care. He would swing the retriever around for about twenty seconds, huffing and grunting with serious purpose, then stop, pause the video, and try again. In his final pass, he got so animated he almost fell over. In total, Raza recorded one minute and forty-eight seconds.

  “I was just goofing around,” Raza told Canada’s Maclean’s magazine in his one and only interview on the subject, eleven years later. “Most 14-year-old boys would do something similar in that situation. Maybe more gracefully.”

  Raza put the video back on the shelf and thought nothing more of it until the following April, when he found a friend in the AV club had taken a still from the practice footage and was using it as his desktop background image. “There’s a video doing the rounds,” the friend explained. “Didn’t you know?” One classmate had found the VHS tape; another transferred it to digital format; a third posted it on the web. Right away, Raza got a sinking feeling—but he had no idea how bad it was going to get.

  It’s hard to estimate how many people have seen the video, now universally known as “Star Wars Kid.” Visit it on YouTube today, and you’ll see it has racked up almost twenty-nine million views, adding a million views every six months or so. But “Star Wars Kid” went viral in May 2003, two years before YouTube was even founded. The video did the rounds on the now-defunct file-sharing service Kazaa, where it was downloaded a million times in its first month. It hit the nascent blogosphere, which was hungry for just this sort of quirky content. A popular website called waxy.org posted it, alongside a version with Raza swinging the saber at superspeed, and from then on it was shared by email. The New York Times did a story. Parodies aired on Family Guy and Arrested Development.

  Today, the remixes are almost as popular as the original. In “Drunken Jedi” (thirteen million views), a special effects company called Kalvascorp turned Raza’s golf ball retriever into a real lightsaber and showed it fending off blaster fire. There are versions showing Raza battling Yoda (four million views) and Agent Smith from The Matrix (two million views).

  In November 2006, a marketing company called the Viral Factory estimated that “Star Wars Kid” had been seen nine hundred million times in its first three years. That would make it the second most popular Internet video of all time, behind only Psy’s monster 2013 hit “Gangnam Style.” By 2014, it seems fair to say that “Star Wars Kid” in its many forms has been seen at least a billion times—in other words, as many times as all tickets sold for all Star Wars movies.

  Raza went through some very dark times. So many reporters called after the New York Times story that the family had to unplug the phone. At school, students clambered onto tabletops to imitate him. The crueler side of the Internet was out in force; a commenter called him a “pox on humanity”; more than one suggested he commit suicide. He never considered it but “couldn’t help but feel worthless.” He did his exams in a high school affiliated with a local hospital, sparking rumors that he’d been sent to a psychiatric ward. His family hired a lawyer that sued the three kids responsible for uploading the video. They sought damages of $160,000, but the settlement they got didn’t even cover the lawyer’s costs.

  Raza got his school life on track with the help of a private tutor and was able to return to St. Joseph’s Seminary for his senior year. He studied law at McGill University and became the president of a local conservation society. He decided to speak out against cyberbullying after another Canadian teen committed suicide when pictures of her rape were posted on the Internet by her accused rapists—a truly horrific case that rather put Raza’s experience in perspective. His message for kids who fall victim to cyberbullying: “You’ll survive. You’re not alone. You are surrounded by people who love you. You have to overcome your shame and get help.”

  It was entirely understandable that Raza was as mortified as he was. What he never quite appreciated, or cared about, was that he had a posse. As soon as the video went viral, before the New York Times had even written about it, far more readers were apologizing for the behavior of the minority. Waxy.org got remorseful and helped organize donations to Raza as a way to apologize. The blog asked for enough to buy him an iPod; 135 readers immediately contributed a total of $1,000.

  Alain Bloch, for one, appreciates Raza and his moves. “We weren’t laughing so much at him as much as we were laughing at ourselves,” Bloch says. “We’ve all picked up a broomstick and waved it around like a lightsaber. That’s why his video became so popular: it was funny and awkward, but ultimately we connected to him. He made us feel more comfortable with our own awkwardness. Our own dreams of being a Jedi.”

  At the end of the Golden Gate Knights class, Bloch gathers everyone into a circle. We sit meditation-style, lightsabers balanced on their ends in front of us, painting our faces in the dark. Luminous beings are we.

  “Take some deep breaths,” says Bloch. “Close your eyes. If you can’t keep them closed, just look at your blade. We have a little Jedi oath, a mantra. So if you want to be a part of it, repeat after me.”

  This is what we repeat:

  There is no emotion.

  There is only stillness.

  There is no thought.

  There is only silence.

  There is no ignorance.

  There is only attention.

  There is no division.

  There is only perception.

  There is no self.

  There is only the Force.

  This mantra turns out to be the Jedi Code—or rather, Bloch’s version of it. There seems to be some disagreement, on planet Star Wars, about exactly what the Jedi Code is. At the Jedi Academy in Disney World, Orlando, instructors tell young padawans to repeat the following “Jedi Code” before they are given their “trainee lightsabers”:

  A Jedi uses the Force,

  For knowledge and defense,

  Never for attack.

  If I disobey these rules,

  Into the crowd I will go back.

  (The kids usually get very quiet on the last line.)

  In Star Wars lore, the Jedi Code is supposed to go back to an ancient order that embraced both the Dark and the Light Side of the Force, called the Je’daii—which means “mystic center,” according to Wookieepedia, a crowd-sourced online encyclopedia—and the code has since changed over time. Here’s its best-known iteration, as used in a hip-hop track called “Jedi Code,” by Rapsody:

  There is no emotion, there is peace.

  There is no ignorance, there is knowledge.

  There is no passion, there is serenity.

  There is no chaos, there is harmony.

  There is no death, there is the Force.

  Bloch says he changed his version of the code for two reasons. First, the original is licensed Lucasfilm material, and you do not want to mess with Lucasfilm on matters of copyright. Second, it didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Couldn’t you call peace a kind of emotion? The lack of passion is kind of a downer; why rob yourself of that? Plus that “there is no death” line might make the casual visitor think they’d stumbled into a religious cult. And if there’s one thing we’ve learned about the Force, it’s that it keeps resolutely refusing to turn into a religious cult.

  Several months after my first class with the Golden Gate Knights, I was asked to participate in Course of the Force. A charity relay race organized by the website Nerdist, it would charge runners with taking a single lightsaber from Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch in Marin, in the north of the San Francisco Bay Area, all the way down to San Diego Comic-Con, the biggest event on the geek calendar. All proceeds were to go to the Make-a-Wish Foundation. Participants would run behind a replica of Jabba’s sail barge o
ne at a time, each taking a leg of the marathon distance, swinging a lightsaber for multiple video cameras.

  I’m self-conscious at the best of times, and I shuddered to think of myself caught on video with a lightsaber. The mirrors at Bloch’s studios were bad enough; this would be a broadcast on one of YouTube’s most popular channels. I’d have to run and spin a lightsaber at the same time. Was I setting myself up to be the next Ghyslain Raza? I would have used that old mainstay “I have a bad feeling about this,” the ominous phrase that features in all six Star Wars movies, but that would hardly be in the spirit of Lucas’s positive thinking. The key to that phrase is that it only ever makes the expected disaster more likely to happen, according to Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi cowriter Lawrence Kasdan. “It’s certainly been true in my own life,” he says.

  Kasdan, it turns out, is kind of the Saint Paul of Force-ology. He may have kept his in-screenplay descriptions of the Force to a mysterious minimum, but he has plenty of his own thoughts on the matter. He believes the Force really exists in terms of being “the combined vibration of all living things,” something we humans contribute to. His personal religion, so far as it goes, is to believe that there is “so much more going on than we can see or perceive, that we’re not alone in this space, that everything that has happened in this space is still there.” It was Lucas and Kasdan together who came up with the immortal line “Try not; do or do not, there is no ‘try’”—the fact that these words came from the mouth of a green puppet does not diminish the fact that they form a profoundly useful dictum that marries purpose and mindfulness, and sticks in the brain for life.

  A lot of pronouncements in Lucas’s philosophy have this kind of straighten-up-and-fly-right feeling to them. He’s warned us about the selfishness and self-destructiveness of the Sith, the Jedi’s mortal enemies. He’s beaten the drum for years on the importance of empathy and our responsibility to one another. Frank Allnutt’s Christian tract was right in one respect: Lucas eschews wallowing in mere pleasure for a higher calling—the joy of doing good for others. But he does so in very humanist language. Take this secular sermon Lucas delivered to the Academy of Achievement in Washington, DC, in 2012:

  Here’s something I learned along the way. Happiness is pleasure, and happiness is joy. It could be either one. Pleasure is short lived. It lasts an hour, a minute a month, and it peaks very high. It’s like drugs, like anything—whether you’re shopping, engaged in any pleasure, it all has the same quality to it. Joy doesn’t go as high as pleasure, but it stays with you. It’s something you can recall. Pleasure you can’t. So the joy will last a lot longer. People who get the pleasure say, “Oh, if I can just get richer, I can get more cars. . . .” You will never relive the moment you got your first car. That’s the highest peak. . . .

  Pleasure’s fun, but just accept the fact that it’s here and gone. Joy lasts forever. Pleasure’s purely self-centered. It’s all about your pleasure. It’s about you. A selfish, self-centered emotion created by a selfish moment for you.

  Joy is compassion. Joy is giving yourself to something else, or somebody else. It is much more powerful than pleasure. If you get hung up on pleasure, you’re doomed. If you pursue joy you’ll find everlasting happiness.

  This, as most of us know, is a hard rule to follow; there are far too many temptations to pleasure. But he’s right: the moments we want to remember are the joyful ones, the things we do with and for others. Take, for example, the time I ran behind Jabba’s sail barge in full Jedi robes, holding a lightsaber high for charity, numerous cameras on the barge capturing every second for Nerdist. And all I could think was I needed to do a forward spin of the lightsaber without messing it up, while running. I felt as alone as Ghyslain Raza. Then I realized I wasn’t alone, because I was running with the hardcore of the Golden Gate Knights, who’d offered to drop everything on a weekday morning and have a jog in the cold San Francisco fog, accompanying me in violation of the rules.

  I thought about the joy of doing dumb things for a good cause; I thought about the kid who lost his dignity, and the billion people who had laughed with or at him. I hoped that he too, someday, would experience a moment of joy from having been Star Wars Kid. Then, after flailing around with the thing, I suddenly executed a perfect forward spin of the lightsaber, and I thought, That’s for you, Ghyslain.

  ________

  * Star Wars producer Gary Kurtz remembers that comparison was exactly the intention.

  * Indeed, Lucas’s long-time assistant, Jane Bay, is a dedicated follower of the Dalai Llama and has written books about her experiences of traveling to Tibet, adopting a daughter there, and then dealing with the grief of losing her.

  6.

  BUCK ROGERS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

  The fact that George Lucas wrote out, typed up, and then deleted a “there must be a Force” scene from THX 1138 was just one sign of the turmoil his one true science fiction movie was going through in his mind. He slashed away at anything that sounded like space fantasy: this was to be a dark debut, in a setting at once futuristic and familiar. But translating all that, from the fluid images in his head into static words, would be one of the most painful operations of his life—alongside the writing part of just about every Star Wars movie.

  “I bleed on the page. It’s just awful.” That’s how the filmmaker has described his writing style, from his first script onwards. The bleeding began in 1968, when Coppola persuaded Warner Brothers to take an option on a feature-length version of Lucas’s award-winning THX short. The $150 weekly checks would also serve as Lucas’s salary on the Rain People. That would buy him time to bleed.

  Lucas was eager to get his ideas on the screen but desperate to outsource the scripting part. Coppola, however, insisted: a director had to learn how to write. Lucas showed him a draft. “You’re right,” Coppola said, horrified. “You can’t write.” They tried writing a draft together. They tried hiring an experienced screenwriter, Oliver Hailey. Neither result adequately translated the images in Lucas’s head onto the page. And so Lucas struggled forward on his own, as he would so many times in the course of his career. Lucas’s talent, time and again, would boil down to this absolute devotion to his wordless ideas, this obstinate opposition to anything that didn’t look like them. THX would not get made until the script was as much as 70 percent the way he’d imagined it, according to his own estimate. It was to be the second highest such number he’d achieve in his scriptwriting career, after the 90 percent figure he offered for The Phantom Menace.

  Lucas scribbled away in motel rooms every morning and evening during the Rain People shoot. Mona Skager, Coppola’s script supervisor, was the designated typist for Lucas’s early drafts. One evening, she said, he was watching television and began to babble about “holograms, space ships, and the wave of the future.” Was this THX trying to work itself out, or something else?

  One gets the sense of a coin spinning in Lucas’s head. On one side was science fiction dystopia: a heavy, meaningful film about who we are and what we’ve done to our world. On the other side: that seemingly lost space fantasy utopia of rocket ships and swashbucklers. “I really loved adventures in outer space,” Lucas would say years later, in response to Skager’s recollection. “I wanted to do something in that genre, which is where THX partially came from. [But] THX really is Buck Rogers in the 20th century, rather than Buck Rogers in the future.”

  Lucas was quite literal about that Buck Rogers connection. He would open the movie with a trailer for Buck Rogers, the 1939 serial. The announcer’s intonation of “Buck Rogers in the twenty-fifth century” was familiar to its audience, having been made famous by the earlier radio serial. (Director Chuck Jones had parodied it in a 1953 Daffy Duck cartoon, a favorite of Lucas’s and Spielberg’s, which screened before all 70mm prints of Star Wars in 1977: “Duck Dodgers in the twenty-fourth-and-a-half century!”)

  But in the opening seconds of THX, a redubbed announcer can clearly be heard saying, “Buck Rogers in the twen
tieth century!” Most viewers paid no heed to the date. They simply assumed the trailer was ironic juxtaposition with the dystopian nightmare that followed. Not for the last time, the meaning of a Lucas movie would be buried in plain sight.

  Lucas finally finished the THX script with the help of Walter Murch. He didn’t hire Murch just to honor their pact that the winner of the Warner scholarship would help out the loser; Murch was on his weirdness wavelength, he said. They brainstormed scenes and shuffled them like cards. The result was resolutely anti-story, full of disjointed moments and snatches of dialogue. It refused to explain anything to the audience. “The problem that George and I found with science-fiction films was that they felt they had to explain these strange rituals,” Murch said. “A Japanese film would just have the ritual and you’d have to figure it out for yourself.”

  Here’s what we figure out: THX 1138 is a citizen in a nameless underground society that has been drugged into sexless happiness by the state. This version of dystopia is far more Brave New World than 1984. No one says the population is unhappy, Lucas later pointed out; it’s just that they’re in a cage. Robot-faced policemen are everywhere—the masked space soldier slowly taking form—as are confessional booths with the face of Jesus from a Hans Memling painting; this is the state deity, OMM. THX spends his evenings in front of the holograms, drugged out, masturbating to erotic dancers, enjoying police beatings. His female roommate, LUH, cuts down her own and THX’s drug supply, which awakens them. They start a tender sexual relationship.

  A coworker, SEN, wants THX as his roommate and fixes things so LUH is transferred. THX and SEN turn each other in for crimes against the state. Tried and tortured, they find themselves with other outcasts in a prison of pure whiteness. SEN tries to organize the group with rhetoric: “One idea could get us out of here!” THX simply walks out. SEN tags along. The pair meet a man claiming to be a hologram and emerge from the white limbo into rush-hour human traffic. SEN can’t go on. While waiting to be taken away, he talks poignantly to children, marveling at how small their drug-based learning tubes are these days. THX and the hologram learn that LUH is dead, her name now repurposed for an embryo in a jar.