The 'Star Wars Kid': Where is he now?

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Today, Canadian law student Ghyslain Raza is president of a nonprofit organisation dedicated to preserving the heritage, culture and history of a riverside French-Canadian town called Trois-Rivières. But before that, the world knew him by a different title: The "Star Wars Kid."

Raza is now a law student at Montreal's McGill University. In February of this year, he took control of the Patrimoine Trois-Rivières (formerly called the Society for Conservation and Promotion of Cultural Heritage), which was founded more than 30 years ago. Raza is trying to revitalise the organisation by reaching out to academics, releasing new publications and working with the city to make sure that developments in the area keep heritage concerns in mind.

Is that where you expected the Star Wars kid to be today? The short attention spans of viral video viewers prevent the subjects of the videos from fully and accurately presenting themselves. Few people would want to be entirely defined by one minute and 48 seconds of fame, but that's the hand Raza was dealt in his youth. Hardly anyone would recognise him these days, though.

That's the other benefit of the web's short attention span.

The hidden story behind the video

Back in 2002, a teenage Raza recorded a video that would become one of the most popular viral hits of all time, and one of the first cautionary tales in the debate about privacy on the internet. In it, he swung a golf ball retriever around as if it were Darth Maul's double-bladed lightsaber in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace and accompanied his movements with muffled sound effects.
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Four classmates discovered the video and distributed it online. It spread rapidly via e-mail and Internet forums, reaching millions of viewers - a great feat in the pre-YouTube era.

News outlets reported that Raza was so ridiculed for his activities in the video that he slipped into depression and had to take time off from school to seek psychiatric care. His family sued the families of the classmates who leaked the video for $250,000, then settled out of court.

The video has been referenced or spoofed on Arrested Development, Family Guy, The Colbert Report and other TV series. Viral marketing company The Viral Factory estimated that the original clip received more than 900 million views back in 2006; if that estimate was close to the mark, then the final number probably lands well over a billion today. Take that, Lady Gaga.

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