A Collection of All the 'Star Wars' 7' Trailer Parodies

ScreenCrush’s WookieeLeaks is a weekly roundup of everything ‘Star Wars’! From ‘Star Wars: Episode 7,’ to the upcoming spinoffs and the TV shows, if it pertains to that long ago, far away galaxy, we’re covering it here, bringing you our expert analysis. This week,

Pretty Much Everyone Watched ‘Star Wars: Episode 7’ Trailer

This time last week, the internet collectively paused for 88 seconds as every single human being with Wi-Fi watched the teaser trailer for ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens.’ And we’re only slightly kidding. As of three days ago, the trailer has been watched nearly 60 million times, putting it well on the path to breaking the record set by ‘The Avengers 2’ only a few weeks back. According to sources who seem to know or thing or two about trailer statistics (because it’s their weird, niche job to know), it may very well become the most watched trailer of all time.

And Disney wouldn’t have it any other way. We’re playing right into their hands, people!

While every nerd worth his or her salt is still picking the trailer apart frame by frame, new rumors suggest that we already know when the next preview will arrive. Yep, corporate synergy strikes again: our next major look at ‘Star Wars: Episode 7’ will arrive with ‘Avengers 2’ on May 1, 2015. After all, the venn diagram of ‘Star Wars’ and Marvel fans is pretty much a circle. Everyone wins!

Interestingly, the first trailer bears the label of “Teaser One” on its iTunes page, which already has some fans speculating. If the full, proper trailer is set to arrive with the next ‘Avengers’ movie, will we be able to pass that time with a handful of additional short teasers? After all, Disney has a major movie hitting on Christmas Day (got to raise that potential ‘Into the Woods’ box office) and then there the Super Bowl, which always plays host to major movie trailers. So that wait may not be as unbearable as you think.

At least artist Phil Noto’s cool poster (that he literally whipped up a day or two after the trailer) isn’t permanently inked on anyone’s skin. Yet.

Phil Noto

All of Those Weird Trailer Controversies in One Place

People take their ‘Star Wars’ very seriously. Too seriously, if we’re going to be completely honest. Some fans take their passion for the saga to levels of extreme that shouldn’t be applied to any form of fiction. And it can get ugly. We’ll get to the dark stuff in a moment. Let’s go ahead and start with the strangest controversy to emerge from the trailer’s release.

Since the fans need something to debate, everyone decided to argue about that mysterious voice narrating the trailer. You know, the voice that sounds a little like Emperor Palapatine and lot like a frog? Anyway, a lot of people decided that his voice sounded a lot like Benedict Cumberbatch, who previous worked with director J.J. Abrams on ‘Star Trek Into Darkness’ and was supposedly in contention for a role in the film. That casting didn’t happen, but the ‘Sherlock’ star (who was literally just cast as Marvel’s ‘Doctor Strange’) still seems to be attached to the production at the hip. A lot of people think he’s still involved in some capacity, even if it’s just a cameo appearance.

Then sources who know things chimed in and confirmed that the voice belongs to Andy Serkis and if you remember his Caesar voice from ‘Dawn of the Planet of the Apes,’ you can totally hear it. And yet there is still a contingent of fans out there convinced that the voice belongs to Cumberbatch and that we’re being lied to (and to be fair, Abrams has straight-up lied to audiences in the past). Not even the Disney-owned ‘Good Morning America’ confirming that the voice is Serkis could quiet this subsection of fandom down. Expect to hear “Cumberbatch is a secret villain!” theories for the next year.

While we’re on the subject of Serkis, let’s take a moment to talk about who or what he is playing in the film. A lot of people (including us) instantly assumed that his experience with motion capture would mean that he’s playing some kind of alien or creature that cannot b created via traditional make-up. However, the latest buzz has him playing two roles in the film, with one of them being mo-cap and the other being plain ‘ol Andy Serkis:

One of those roles is, as expected, motion capture based - and in that role he will be part of a ‘group of unbelievably athletic and acrobatic motion capture characters.’ Also bringing those characters to life is parkour expert Pip Anderson, and ‘whom I [the source] believe to be Crystal Clarke.’
The second role for Serkis sees him take on a ‘pivotal role in the first act story arc that entwines with Daisy Ridley’s backstory,’ and that role ‘may have more to it than it seems in the first instance.’

We still don’t know enough about Daisy Ridley’s character to speculate on how his character could be connected to her. But why dwell on that when we can talk about how Serkis, one of the coolest character actors working today, is getting the chance to play two characters in the film? Motion capture has gotten steadily better over the years and the fact that this tech will allow actors enough freedom to appear twice in a single film is just plain cool.

Okay. Now let’s take a brief dip into the ugly stuff.

Anyone who has seen ‘Attack the Block’ knows that John Boyega is the real deal, a movie star waiting in the wings. Yet, a certain, specific portion of ‘Star Wars’ fandom can’t see past the color of his skin. Yes, there are racist ‘Star Wars’ fans out there and yes, they’re pissed off that there’s a black lead in ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens.’ Some of these racist jerks just posted hateful comments. Others re-edited the trailer to remove him completely. Wading through this is enough to depress any fan who isn’t a hateful person. You wouldn’t believe the number of people who said things like “Lando was one of the ‘good ones.’”

Thankfully, Boyega himself managed to undercut all of this is the classiest way possible. In the middle of an Instagram post about his excitement for the film, he left a little message for anyone and everyone angry about the color of his skin.

Yep. He’s a badass.

Every old school fan of ‘Star Wars’ knows that the Clone Troopers of the prequels and the Stormtroopers from the original trilogy are completely different. And yet, some fans flipped out when John Boyega popped up in the trailer because he wasn’t a clone! We can only assume that these are the younger fans, weaned on the prequels (shudder). Thankfully, the official ‘Star Wars’ Twitter feed cleared all of this up:

And finally, since fans can’t stop complaining about anything, everyone went after that broadsword lightsaber, shouting that this completely fictional laser sword was impractical. Thankfully, uber-nerd Stephen Colbert stepped in and cleared this up once and for all.

Trailer Parodies Galore!

The ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ trailer was always going to inspire parodies, but what was actually pretty remarkable was how quickly so many different kinds of parodies appeared on the internet. Seriously, it seemingly took less than a day for the first of these things to start emerging on YouTube. To be fair, it is one of the cleverest ways to ignore your family on Thanksgiving weekend…

As you’d expect, the parodies run the gamut from pretty great to awfully lame, so let’s go ahead and start with the cream of the crop. The “George Lucas Special Edition” trailer is exactly what you think it is: someone went in and added a who bunch of unnecessary garbage to every single frame. It’s an easy and mean joke, but man, the execution is flawless.

Second on the tier of awesomeness is a video that puts the audio of the new trailer over footage from Mel Brooks’ ‘Spaceballs.’ The results are surprisingly good.

And yes, there is a LEGO version of the trailer. This was inevitable. In fact, there are probably going to be hundreds of LEGO recreations of varying quality over the next few months. After all, what else are you going to do with all of those ‘Star Wars’ LEGOs you bought?

Since Disney now owns LucasFilm and ‘Star Wars,’ someone thought it would be amusing if they replaced a whole bunch of characters in the trailer with Disney icons. They were partially right. This one is about 50% effective.

And finally, for the sake of completion, here’s the trailer recut in the style of Wes Anderson. To be specific, it’s been recut in the style of Wes Anderson by someone who really doesn’t get or understand Anderson’s style in any meaningful way. Was that too mean? That was probably too mean.

Your Lonely Potential Spoiler of the Week

With the trailer supplying actual, honest-to-god things to talk about, the past week was awfully light on rumors, speculation and spoilers. However, Making Star Wars did supply one tidbit of potential interest. This could be completely made up or it could have long since changed, but since their sources have proven reliable in the past, consider the rest of this section to contain spoilers.

The site claims to have a vague description of a scene late in the film. Daisy Ridley’s still-mysterious heroine has been captured by Chrome Stormtroopers (remember that concept art from awhile back?) and brought before the main villain, presumably played by Adam Driver. As she’s led away, she (supposedly, maybe, possibly) shouts something that should give us an indication of this bad guy’s motivation:

You’ll never be as powerful as Darth Vader!

Interesting. This line of dialogue fits right into the puzzle of this villain. After all, we did see that concept art of him cradling Darth Vader’s helmet and that fancy new lightsaber from the trailer does look like the work of a deranged Sith fanboy.

Everything Else

The first ‘Star Wars’ spin-off movie has a production codename and it’s … ‘Los Alamos.’ That could literally be a randomly selected phrase with zero relevance to the actual film, but please feel free to speculate away.

Did you know that Mark Hamill teased a seventh film way back in the day and got some of the Luke Skywalker details right?

And finally, the good folks here at ScreenCrush has compiled some pretty cool facts about the new film into one handy video. Use this trivia to impress your friends! Or your family! Or the other drunks at your local bar!