About

"Yo Dudes, The Empire Is Pretty Chill" refers to a memorable quote spoken by Darth Vader in the trailer for the unreleased animated television series Star Wars: Detours. The scene, as well as the audio and dialogue, became the subject of memes in early 2021, primarily video edits where it was used as an exploitable in various remixes.

Origin

On October 17th, 2012, YouTuber^[1] Star Wars HoloNet uploaded the trailer for an animated Star Wars comedy series titled, Star Wars: Detours to their channel. Around the 11-second mark in the trailer, Darth Vader appears on the screen and says in a comedic way, "Yo dudes, the Empire is pretty chill, maybe you could, like, join it or something," parodying recruitment videos to appeal to the youth (shown below). The series was never released, but the video received over 575,000 views, 9,400 likes and 1,890 comments in roughly eight years.

Spread

The scene received mild attention over the next few years. On June 5th, 2020, YouTuber^[2] Microtsuki posted an edited version of the fight scene between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader from Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back where Vader turns into his animated counterpart as he corner's Luke and says the line, to which Luke refuses to join, resulting in his hand getting cut off (shown below). The video gained over 140,000 views in eight months.

On December 9th, Internet Things uploaded a low-res version of Darth Vader's scene from the trailer to YouTube,^[3] garnering over 62,000 views in 2 months.

On December 17th, 2020, @tinsley_cryo uploaded the scene to TikTok, ^[4] garnering over 200,000 views in two months. This helped spread the video around TikTok, inspiring users to make videos with the sound throughout December (examples shown below, left and right).^[5][6]

Following its spread on TikTok, users began uploading videos from the platform to YouTube, often receiving tens of thousands of views.^[7][8] On January 29th, 2021, YouTuber^[9] MGL3000 uploaded a greenscreen version of the video meant to be used as a template, gaining over 9,300 views in two weeks (shown below).

In early February, the trend picked up significantly on YouTube as users uploaded more video edits involving the scene.^[10][11] On February 11th, 2021, YouTuber^[12] Memeify uploaded a video using the scene, garnering over 49,000 views in 24 hours (shown below, left). That same day, YouTuber^[13] The Lego Beast uploaded a video recreating the scene with LEGO, garnering over 50,000 views in 24 hours (shown below, right).

On February 12th, 2021, YouTuber^[14] Lessons in Meme Culture uploaded a video detailing the meme, receiving over 82,000 views in less than a day (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References