You may have noticed the phrase "May the Fourth be with you" all over the internet today. It's a phrase to celebrate Star Wars Day, the unofficial holiday that takes place every year on May 4 and has become a global trend among "Star Wars" fans.
But how exactly did the concept originate?
It all began with a phrase from "Star Wars: A New Hope." In the 1977 film, General Dodonna gives his rebel fighters one last bit of encouragement before they begin an assault on the Death Star.
"Then man your ships! And may the Force be with you," he says.
A play on the words surfaced in 1979 after the U.K. Conservative Party celebrated its general election victory by taking out a newspaper advertisement saying, "May the Fourth Be With You, Maggie. Congratulations!" according to USA Today.
Then, 15 years later, a member of the opposition Labor Party, Harry M. Cohen, used the phrase, claiming that May 4 was an appropriate day to debate the defense budget because it could be called "national Star Wars Day," explained Steve Sansweet, head of Fan Relations at Lucasfilm and chief executive of Rancho Obi-Wan, a non-profit museum housing the world’s largest private collection of "Star Wars" memorabilia.
Several years later, the phrase began to latch on.
"At first it was just a punch line to an unspoken joke," Sansweet recalled. "I really can’t remember the first time I heard it. It was like a tea kettle on simmer: it took a long time to boil and start blowing enough steam to whistle. When someone first mentioned a 'Star Wars' holiday, I thought they were referring to May 25, 1977, the day the movie opened on 32 theater screens in the U.S."
Over the next few years, the phrase gained traction and began to crop up in other films, books, video games, and TV specials. Even Disney began to recognize the holiday after acquiring Lucasfilm in 2012. Then in 2020, it used the holiday to mark the finale of the "Star Wars: The Clone Wars" animated series on Disney+, CNN noted. This year it will debut the series "Star Wars: The Bad Batch," on May 4.
Star Wars Day certainly has taken the world by storm, but if you were to consider it logically, the basis of the idea may not seem so special. Alysia Gray Painter of KNBC summed it up perfectly several years ago.
"What’s so special about May 4, anyway," she said, according to Sansweet. "It’s based on 'May' and 'fourth' and how much the word 'fourth' sounds like the word 'force' … well, you get the idea. May the fourth be with you. It’s wonderfully silly, it’s harmless, and we always welcome both of those things in a world that is too often neither."
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Zoe Papadakis ✉
Zoe Papadakis is a Newsmax writer based in South Africa with two decades of experience specializing in media and entertainment. She has been in the news industry as a reporter, writer and editor for newspapers, magazine and websites.
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