Viral Videos

On November 4, 2002 Ghyslain Raza made a video of himself swinging a golf ball retriever around as a Darth Maul-style light saber. The video was filmed at the studio of his high school, and the tape was left forgotten in a basement for a few months. On or around April 19, 2003, the original owner of the videotape discovered Raza's recorded acts and immediately shared it with some friends. Thinking that it would be a funny prank, they encoded it to a WMV file and shared it in Kazaa under the filename Jackass_starwars_funny.wmv.
Within two weeks, the file was downloaded several million times. An adapted version of the video was created, adding Star Wars music, texts, and lightsaber lights and sounds to Raza's golf ball retriever. According to Waxy.org, this was done by Bryan Dube, an employee from Raven Software. Several gaming, technology and Star Wars-related sites began to host the video, further increasing downloads. Days later a second "Matrix Reloaded" version hit the internet. Soon, people all over the world picked up the original and began making conversions of it, adding music, visual effects, and sounds, combining it with other well-known videos or scenes from films.
As of 27th November 2006 it had been estimated by that over 900 million internet users have viewed a version of the original video. This makes it the most popular "viral video" on the Internet.