Star Wars Kid

The story

Raza was 14 or 15, sources differ, and he was rehearsing fight moves for a Star Wars parody at his school in Trois-Rivières when he filmed himself one evening. Months later, classmates found the tape, turned it into a computer file and shared it on the Kazaa file-sharing network as a prank.

It went around the world in about two weeks. A games developer, Bryan Dube, added glowing lightsabers and sound on 24 April 2003, and the blogger Andy Baio, who gave the clip its name, counted 1.1 million downloads of the two versions from his own site. In May 2003 a New York Times story made it international news.

For Raza it was a nightmare. He was taunted at school until he could no longer go to classes, and strangers online were cruel. His parents sued the families of the classmates who had posted it, and the case was settled out of court in 2006. By then a marketing firm estimated the clip and its versions had been watched about 900 million times.

Why it matters

It was one of the first videos watched by a mass audience online, spread by file sharing and blogs before YouTube existed. It is also one of the first widely known cases of cyberbullying, and a lasting lesson about sharing something of someone else’s without asking them first.

Where it is now

Raza stayed silent for ten years. In 2013 he spoke to the Quebec magazine L’actualité to help young people who are bullied, and he told his own story in the National Film Board of Canada’s 2022 documentary. Andy Baio has apologised to him for sharing the video.