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Author Name: BoingBoing
This story was originally published on Boingboing.net. [1]
License: CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0.[2]


Claimed footage of cinemagoers' reaction to Darth Vader's "I am your father" line has another surprise

2022-05-14 00:00:00

Here's a clip that's implied to be from a pirate recording of Empire Strikes Back filmed at a cinema in 1980. It offers two interesting things. First, the audio of the audience reacting to Darth Vader's classic line, "I am your father."

Second, Vader says it like this: "No, Luke, I am your father."

It's at 0m54s. Why is that interesting? Because that's listed everywhere as a classic misheard line: he canonically says "No, I am your father" (and certainly says that in other versions of the movie, including in clips described as the original) and people who insist he says "Luke, I am your father" are held to be suffering from some kind of Mandela Effect delusion.

Yet here it is, in all its originally-screened 1980 glory. WHAT IS GOING ON? Is this a manipulated or misrepresented clip?

The video description has a whiff about it that makes me think it is:

Found in Goodwill in January 2017. I didn't think much of it until now.

Hmmm.

It would certainly be easy to find an example of James Earl Jones' Vader saying "Luke" and interpolate it into the sentence. It's not like you have to worry about lip-synching.

He says it rather too quickly, too: I reckon that if you removed the word "Luke" from this, the remaining "No… I am your father" would match up to what's found in the other versions. This would surely confirm it to be fake, because if there were a take including the word that found its way to the theaters, it would have a different cadence elsewhere in the sentence—unless Lucas himself had it edited in mechanically at the time, a supremely unlikely proposition.

The close angle of the recording doesn't help it's credibility, either, because you can't see the surroundings (no heads in the way, for example) or even the size of the screen. And the low quality transfer mushes over any indication of the technology used to record it. It would surely have been an 8mm camera. There were portable video cameras available by 1980, but nothing you might shoulder in the front row of a movie theater.

Putting in the audience reactions and presenting those as the highlight here would make this a clever and subtle hoax, though, if indeed it is a hoax. Bravo!

You think someone would do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies?
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[1] URL: https://boingboing.net/2022/05/14/claimed-footage-of-cinemagoers-reaction-to-darth-vaders-i-am-your-father-line-has-another-surprise.html
[2] URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/deed.en_US

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