Star Wars Kid Opens Up About Harassment As A Result Of 2000s Viral Video
Ghyslain Raza, known on the internet as the Star Wars Kid, discusses the harassment he endured as a result of the video of him that went viral in the 2000s. Following a 26-year hiatus, a galaxy far, far away returned to the big screen in 1999 with Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace. George Lucas went on to make Attack of the Clones (2003) and Revenge of the Sith (2005), cementing Star Wars' ever-evolving place in pop culture's lexicon.
In 2003, 14-year-old Ghyslain Raza was working with a video camera in his high school class and filmed one of the earliest viral videos, which sees him use a golf ball retriever to imitate Darth Maul’s double-sided lightsaber from Episode I. After classmates got ahold of the footage and uploaded it to the Internet, the “Star Wars Kid” was born and changed online pop culture forever. The video was viewed hundreds of millions of times, leading to Raza being joked about via a variety of publications/outlets and parodied on shows like Arrested Development, South Park, and The Colbert Report. Years later, Raza is finally speaking publicly about the harassment he faced and the details of the legal suit against his classmates and the media.
Related: Obi-Wan Hints At Repeating The Best Part Of His Star Wars Prequels Story
In a recent interview with CTV News, the now 34-year-old Raza discussed being the subject of Mathieu Fournier’s documentary Star Wars Kid: The Rise of Digital Shadow. The film dives into the viral video as well as topics including privacy and the age of social media. As Raza puts it, “there is an element of surrealism in all of this, I used to watch Arrested Development before it became a plot point in the storyline. When you see this come up on screen and it's clearly
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