How Star Wars fans are reclaiming the prequels with memes

Gone but never forgotten.
Gone but never forgotten.
Image: lucasfilm

The three Star Wars prequel movies are finding redemption in the most unlikely location: dank memes on Reddit. 

The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith were pilloried when they were released (in 1999, 2002 and 2005, respectively). All were critically panned at the time for poor dialogue, uneven plots, cardboard characters and an over-reliance on special effects.

At the same time, the prequels were all box office blockbusters and introduced an entire generation to Star Wars fandom. Now those kids who thrilled to Jar Jar Binks are in their 20s and making their presence known. They're able to laugh about the prequels — and love them at the same time.

Case in point: r/prequelmemes. Launched in December, this subreddit is well on its way to hyperspace. Twice this month, r/prequelmemes has been crowned the fastest growing non-default subreddit on the whole site. It has 134,000 subscribers and counting — not quite as big as  r/Starwars just yet, but certainly bigger than r/Christianity — and perhaps most importantly, bigger than r/Startrek. 

Why the prequels, and why now? Well, in 2017 the appeal of what is essentially a three-act story about a Republic turning into a dictatorship is obvious and well-represented by the meme above. Senator (later Chancellor, later Emperor) Palpatine is the ideal stand-in for our fears about Trump.

But there's a lot more going on in r/prequelmemes, which can best be seen as a forum to help process and reclaim three movies that don't get a whole lot of love from society at large. This processing is happening in exactly the same way as it did with the original Star Wars trilogy, after which fans reused lines from "let the wookiee win" to "no disintegrations!" until everyone on the planet knew them by heart.

Primarily, the memes revolve around relatively obscure quotes from the prequels — such as when Palpatine responds to his brief arrest by the Jedi and potential Senate trial by arrogantly declaring "I am the Senate!"

As is the case with a lot of movie villains, Palpatine's dialogue straddles the line between scary (for the younger viewers) and unintentionally hilarious (for the older ones revisiting the movies of their childhood.) 

And no chunk of dialogue does this like, "Did you ever hear the tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise?" — Palpatine's roundabout bid to reveal himself as a Sith Lord to his young would-be apprentice, Annakin Skywalker.

If you've seen one of several widely-shared screenshots where a prankster has replaced the word "sorry" on a friend's phone with the entire Plagueis speech, you can thank r/prequelmemes. 

Scenery-chewing Palpatine and forever brooding Anakin Skywalker are natural targets for humor, of course. But the subreddit has also come to celebrate obscure characters from the prequels (Dexter Jettster, anyone?) 

And then of course there are the regular old-fashioned jokes — but all told out of love for the prequels, not hate. 

And the party is just beginning. For one thing, there's a new subreddit called r/sequelmemes based entirely on the Star Wars sequel trilogy — which currently consists of exactly one movie, The Force Awakens. It too is gaining subscribers at a rapid clip, though not quite as rapid as r/prequelmemes. 

A healthy rivalry is developing between the subreddits — to the point where the rivalry is becoming the subject of many of the memes themselves. As more sequel movies are released, starting with The Last Jedi this December, such rivalry is only likely to grow. 


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