My Viral Video

http://mentalfloss.com/article/58771/27-offbeat-college-essay-topics
Essay #9 of 27

You've just reached your one millionth hit on your YouTube video--what is the video about?

Thanks to the success of Disney's purchase of Lucasfilm and their reboot of the Star Wars franchise, they decide, after the conclusion of the Skywalker saga with "Star Wars: Episode XII, The Balance of the Force," to completely re-do George Lucas's misbegotten prequel trilogy, a.k.a. Episodes I-III. In order to find the best story, they invite aspiring writers and filmmakers to post 15-minute videos showing a completely rebooted opening sequence to Episode I.

Working with filmmaking wizard Sean Warren and a cast of aspiring young actors from the college theater department, I finally put my vision for how Episode I should have started all those years ago. The million-plus hits are the votes that my version gets from public votes selecting my story treatment as the winner for the initiative to forever erase the travesty of Jar-Jar Binks.

Here's how my video opens: We see Obi-Wan Kenobi flying his starfighter through the crowded skies of Coruscant. He's tracking reports of dark side activity in one of the dangerous neighborhoods surrounding the capitol. He lands his spacecraft and secures it with his built-in droid. He fails to notice the young teen boy lurking in the shadows of a nearby alley.

After Kenobi leaves, the boy emerges from the shadows and removes a small electronic device from his cloak. He plugs the device into an access panel on Kenobi's ship and overrides the droid's security measures, ordering the droid to open the cockpit and start the ship's engines. Kenobi, now several blocks away, looks up to see his ship flying off without him.

We see the teenager flying into a high-security area by using the ship's computer to transmit the Jedi Knight's security code. Once he lands the ship, he breaks into a series of vaults to steal Republic currency. He leaves the area without attracting any attention, then flies the ship to an illicit dealer who pays him for the ship and promises him no one will be able to find it. "Don't worry about it, Skywalker," the dealer says. "This ship will be harder to trace than you are."

"No chance of that," Anakin tells him, holding his hand up to the dealer. "I was never here. You and I have never met. You have no memory of me."

"You and I have never met," the dealer says, in a far-away voice, as Anakin once again fades into the shadows.

The last thing we see in the video is Republic security officers entering the Jedi Temple with a warrant for Obi-Wan Kenobi's arrest, since security records show that his ship accessed a secure area where vaults were robbed the night before. Obi-Wan is forced to admit to the Jedi Council that his ship had been stolen the night before, news that is met with laughter from the Council. Our final shot is a red-faced, embarrassed Obi-Wan...