A couple of punks tried to ruin the life of the Star Wars Kid, as a 15 year old Canadian named Ghyslain has come to be known to 15 million people on the Internet.
We don’t know his last name because his parents want to protect his identity. Ghyslain is a big kid but it’s highly unlikely that he’ll be a fat adult with the moves he was making in a school video studio as part of a school project. He didn’t know he was being video taped. He certainly didn’t know that his moment of uninhibited dorkiness would end up spreading like wildfire across the planet.
The perpetrators stole the video from the school. They put it on KaZaa. They thought they were pretty fscking clever. They thought they could destroy him. After all, he’s just a fat ass geek, right?
Now, Obiwan Kenobi is worth quoting: “Strike me down and I’ll become more powerful than you can ever imagine.”
The Star Wars Kid is at least as good as Darth Maul with the double lightsabre action. He deserves a spot in the upcoming 2005 film Star Wars Episode III. A petition to Lucasfilm to get Ghyslain a cameo is already in full force. When our fearless leader signed it, he was the 88600th signature, give or take a few. To put this petition in perspective, the Hillary for President petition doesn’t come close. The number is one-third of the biggest political inferno on the site–the European anti-software patents petition.
Expect it to soar as the story grows. The reasons for signing are hardly trivial.
The net was founded by geeks and developed by geeks. Many of these denizens had to face some tauntings and some awkward social experiences growing up. By the fact that his perpetrators used the program KaZaA for their crime, it’s safe to say that these punks weren’t technically inclined nor were they geeks because they picked the wrong playground to pick a fight.
The Star Wars Kid did something that every fan of the movie has done or wanted to do since the first movie came out in 1977. Who doesn’t want to drop into their imagination for a few minutes and experience an intense Jedi swordfight?
In their zest to brand Ghyslain as a “geek”, undeserving of membership in a certain clique or marked for social torture, his perpetrators turned him into a superstar with the good-willed moniker of The Star Wars Kid. Talented and sympathetic (and proud) “geeks” have come to his aid with video editing skills to create a collection of clips that make Ghyslain the coolest dude on the planet.
To his perpetrators, we salute you. Just visualize our collective middle finger. Breaking the law is criminal. Defamation is civil. Learn the power of the dark side… dorks.
