About

Luke, je suis ton père parodies are 1-pane exploitable comics featuring Darth Vader ("Dark Vador" in French) and a kneeling Luke Skywalker face to face while reviving the famous Star Wars episode 5: The Empire Strikes Back^[1] movie scene when the former reveals that he is Luke's father.
These parodies were first made with puns and rhymic alternate lines, but it then expanded itself to replace Darth Vader by many French culture icons such as politicians, singers and so forth.

Introduction

Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back is a 1980 science-fiction/space opera movie, second one of what will further be the first Star Wars trilogy.
One of its most famous scenes, near the end of the film, is the revelation of Darth Vader, the main vilain, being the hero's, Luke Skywalker, father:

It's then become a common classic line among fans.
The original quote is No, I am your father (Non, je suis ton père) but it quickly became misquoted as Luke, I am your father ^[2] (Luke, je suis ton père), line which has surpassed the initial one's popularity throughout the years.

Origin

On April 7th 2003, a topic named (strip) Star wars: ton univers impitoyableuhbeuhh was started on the Café Salé forum^[3], a website community gathering artists from different media.
This peculiar topic was made by forum user Gaijinsan in order to expose some of his drawings based on the 1999 Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace movie.
On the 2nd of June, user Materiax posted the following picture:

Vader: Luke, I slept with your mother.
Luke: No!

This, along with another picture in the post that follows, are taken from a personal website (now defunct)^[4] used to upload artworks from a user called nadjika04. Because of the other forum users reactions to the post, it appears safe to assume that nadjika04 and Materiax are the same person.

It was seen as a funny picture that gained some attention among users, but it wasn't until the 22nd of February 2004 that user Fox got the idea to modify the picture^[5]. The result:

Vader: Luke, I forgot to buy the yogurt.
Luke: No!

He then continued to create more alterations. The thread began to gather attention centred around people making alterations from the initial picture.
This thread has extended to 51 pages.

Exploitable trend

These images began to be hosted on many other French websites, including Emarketing^[6], Webrankinfo^[7], LeLoMbriK^[8], Triskal^[9] or even Hardware.fr which nicknamed it as Vadorz^[10].
A forum thread from Koreus^[11] pointed at a an image generator hosted as a php project at Neriki website as early as 2005^[12]. A more recent one can also be found in a website entirely dedicated to the phenomenon^[13].

On a related note, surely inspired by the exploitable trend, a user named Ganesh2 made a dubbing parody of the famous scene, reusing actual Star Wars footage (In French):

French Podcast

On April 13th 2011, Ecrans.fr broadcast a radio podcast about the meme^[14], in a part called La Minute Mème (the Meme Minute), with a link to this article as a way to explain it further. That weekly radio programme, talking about internet culture and including a part about memes, is also scheduled to be broadcast on TV channel Nolife. A list of parodies is hosted at the end of their article.

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External references