Ghyslain Raza

On November 8, 2002 Raza had made a video of himself acting like the Star Wars character Darth Maul, using a golf ball retriever to represent his lightsaber. It was filmed at the studio of his high school (Séminaire St-Joseph). On April 19, 2003 one of his friends stumbled on the tape and uploaded it to the Kazaa peer-to-peer file sharing network as a prank.

The video file spread across the Internet extremely rapidly; within only weeks it had been downloaded millions of times. Within days artists all over the world began making modifications such as adding music, visual effects and sounds, combining it with other well-known videos or scenes from films, etc. for comical effect. Among the many renditions is a Matrix video, with Ghyslain as Neo.

Raza reportedly suffered considerable embarrassment, in part because the video showed him to be somewhat overweight and not particularly athletic or graceful. The case raised important privacy issues and was extensively reported in mainstream news media worldwide, including the New York Times and CBS News and BBC News.

In July 2003 his family filed a CDN$ 250,000 lawsuit against the families of the schoolmates — Michaël Caron, François Labarre, Jérôme Laflamme, and Jean-Michel Rheault — who allegedly took the video and put it on the Internet without Raza's consent, claiming that Raza had suffered harassment and derision both from his schoolmates and from the general public because of the video. The lawsuit stated that he had dropped out of school and had finished his school year at the Pavillon Arc-en-ciel child psychiatry ward at the Trois-Rivières Regional Hospital Centre, and quoted Internet chat transcripts between the four defendants as demonstrating lack of remorse.

An internet petition to get Raza a cameo in Star Wars Episode III received more than 140,000 "signatures". It is believed however that despite George Lucas sympathizing with the young man's plight there were no plans to include such a cameo, nor is it clear that Raza himself would have wished it.

Cultural references

In 2004, an episode of Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends featured a story entitled World Wide Wabbit, which may have been based on this. Unlike Ghyslain Raza, the character caught on tape actually benefited from it by creating awareness of the foster home.

In 2004, the video game Tony Hawk's Underground 2 featured two references to Ghyslain Raza. In the Boston level an overweight kid with glasses can be found inside an apartment, you can walk up to him and make him dance around and make wooshing noises as Star Wars like music plays in the background. He can also be found in the hidden area of the Triangle level in which he can be seen standing atop an operating table fending off alien doctors.

In 2005, the TV-series Arrested Development did a spoof on the Star Wars kid video. The character caught on tape in that instance also benefited from it, as his ex-girlfriend reconciled with him after seeing the video because she had a similiar habit.

See also