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. 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, 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.