Let me tell you a story.
On January 22, 2004 – during my second year of college – I had an idea. My idea was that Yoda was hella badass, and that a video of him fighting lots of different opponents would be totally sweet.
Problem: I had few, if any, video-making skills. I was, however, pretty handy with MS Paint.
You can see where this is going.
Over the next month and a half, I worked obsessively, creating twenty different battles, an extra bonus fight, an intro, credits, and outtakes & deleted scenes. Frame by frame, over a thousand in all, handcrafted lovingly with the wonders of MS Paint. Complete with background music. Nineteen minutes long.
On March 7, 2004, Yoda vs. Everybody made its debut to a packed house. (Admittedly, the dorm rooms were pretty small.)
In spite of its Stone Age graphics, I loved that video as much as anything I’d ever made. Unfortunately, because I knew nothing about video editing, I ended up with a horrifically uncompressed file. I seem to recall it was something like 20 gigabytes, though that may be high. The point is, due to its massive size, making a backup would be cumbersome. I never got around to it. The file on my personal hard drive was the only copy that existed anywhere.
You can see where this is going.
Sometime in the autumn of October 2005, I moved from the dorms to an apartment, and my hard drive was damaged in the process. Unrecoverable, despite the heroic efforts of my fellow Computer Science majors. Yoda vs. Everybody was lost to the world forever, one of the minor tragedies of my own personal Bildungsroman.
Until now.
As I’ve mentioned, I recently took a graduate course in Digital Forensics – which involves, among other things, recovering data from hard drives. Armed with newfound knowledge and confidence, I retrieved my battered disk from the basement where I had still been keeping it, without much hope, just in case. I devoted a whole weekend back in July to the attempt. And with the help of some very powerful software called Active@ File Recovery, I was able to get back enough files to reconstruct the entire video, start to finish, music and all.
Yoda vs. Everybody lives again.
My friends have convinced me that this little relic deserves a wider audience. I’ve decided to put it on YouTube.
Wanna see?
Brian D. Buckley 
Hella yeah! As one of the people at that packed premiere, I have mourned the loss of this classic for many a year. Almost as epic as our fansub will be (though with much broader appeal).
And of course, when we post the fansub on YouTube, we won’t be using our real names… 😉
This is very exciting!
*dons party hat* 😀
Awesome!!! That video was amazing. Quick, put it up!
Thanks Zeev. 🙂 Coming soon.
I’ll be interested to see this! I’d love it if you were able to post it over the weekend, and if you do, would you mind linking it to a comment or something? (My weekdays are kind of packed now, so if you can’t upload it this weekend then I’ll be forced to wait another week. Although that’s not a horrific delay, I am curious about this).
Oh, also, quick question: Since yesterday you posted about A.I. and how much happier it made you than writing novels, will you still be posting poetry occasionally? I can read poetry elsewhere, but since your poetry is the first poetry that I read and really liked, I would enjoy it if you still posted poems from time to time. Of course, if you don’t want to write poetry anymore, I can live with that too.
Thanks! I appreciate that. Yes, I still enjoy writing shorter forms, including stories and poetry. I expect I’ll continue to post that occasionally.
Hi Alex! I am planning to post it in parts, with the first part going up tomorrow. Enjoy!