May 22, 2008 11:14 AM
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Wed Feb 10
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Remember the Star Wars Kid, that high schooler in Quebec who viddied himself doing Jedi moves with a pole? And then the jerks at his school stuck the video on Kazaa, and somebody else added special effects to make his pole look like a real light saber, and then suddenly the video was all over the web and you couldn't go three clicks without seeing this kid doing the nerd dance? Turns out more people may have tuned into him than the most recent Star Wars movie.
Andy Baio, who hosted one of the most-accessed Star Wars Kid videos (and who in fact named it "Star Wars Kid") has a crunchy data analysis of what happened during that fateful month of May 2003 when a Canadian Star Wars nerd became, briefly, the Most Famous Meme in the World. One thing is for sure: With over half a million people watching that video on Baio's site alone in one day, audience numbers were probably comparable to the number of people who saw Revenge of the Sith during its opening day, when it showed on 3,663 screens. [Star Wars Kid: The Data Dump via Waxy]
Send an email to Annalee Newitz, the author of this post, at annalee@io9.com.
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