The End of the 00s: When the Geeks Took Over, by John Sellers

by The End of the 00s

“I am really glad that digital video cameras and file sharing didn’t exist in 1985.”

Like everybody else, this was my initial reaction the first time I watched the Star Wars Kid video, those 108 cringe-worthy seconds of 14-year-old Canadian student Ghyslain Raza wielding a golf ball retriever as though it were a double-sided lightsaber, which gets my unsolicited vote as the definitive pop-culture moment of the 2000s.

If those tools had existed back then, surely I would have recorded my unironically choreographed dance routine to Duran Duran’s “The Reflex”, and surely my sadistic older brother would have uploaded it. Certainly he would have turned me into a Reagan-era Chris Crocker by surreptitiously filming me as I sat in my room and bawled after learning that the Jason Bateman sitcom “It’s Your Move” had been canceled. And I shudder to think what could have happened that time I went LARPing and got smacked in the groin by a friend’s tinfoil-covered broom handle/bo stick.

In the 2000s, we learned that most of us love nothing better than to watch videos of other people’s embarrassing moments all day long, and to pass them around to our friends, and by extension, the world.

And the person who taught us this was the Star Wars Kid.

Obviously, the video, which has been viewed over 900 million times since it went viral at the end of 2002, represents the best and worst of the past decade. It’s entirely D.I.Y., the ethos that gave rise to bloggers, social networking, and Tila Tequila. It has schadenfreude (a term I hate, because it reminds me of Mummenschanz), which led to The Soup, Perez Hilton, and the mainstreaming of tabloids. But most importantly — and this is where it separates itself from the Atlanta Grape Lady video, Lolcats, and the Susan Boyle clip — the Star Wars Kid is entirely dork-centric, surfacing at the start of a decade in which geeks took over the world, for better or worse. I mean, no one would have cared if he’d just been pretending to be Mike Tyson.

As hilarious as the video still is, the lasting impression it unfortunately makes is that it would suck to be poor Ghyslain Raza. Getting caught pretending to be Darth Maul has got to feel a lot worse than taking a tinfoil bo stick to the genitals.

John Sellers is the author of Perfect From Now On: How Indie Rock Saved My Life and writes a blog called The Enthusiast at True/Slant.