In recent years, I have lost interest in Star Wars, especially the prequel trilogy, preferring another distant sandy world on which a different young man discovers his destiny. So I pointedly avoided the Disney+ miniseries Obi-Wan Kenobi, which filled in some of the story of everyone’s favorite Jedi between the prequels and the original trilogy.
What I’ve done instead is watched the Auralnauts ‘treatment’ of Obi-Wan Kenobi (now called “Larry,” for complicated and amusing reasons). The moniker of a creative team of immense power and talent, Auralnauts has given me great enjoyment over the years. The Auralnauts YouTube account is impossible to describe in brief. But some of the best videos one can find there are parodies/remixes of popular media. In such videos, clever editing and artful lip-dubbing create entire new stories out of existing works. See this parody of Bane from The Dark Knight Rises, which turns him into a health nut.
Such efforts can be a little easier when there are a lot of masked characters, or a lot of characters with fixed faces. But this is only a partial explanation of the incredible success and hilarity of the Auralnauts treatment of Star Wars. In this telling, which began with parody videos of the prequels, “the Jedi are douche bags, the Sith are business savvy powerhouses, and droids are mentally unstable sociopaths,” as the account puts it. Call it Star Wars “from a certain point of view.” The initial prequel effort has spun out into an entire canon, with its own lore and consistent internal logic, that both pays tribute to Star Wars and playfully parodies it. You can watch the whole thing here.
The Auralnauts version of Obi-Wan Kenobi is a worthy entry to this new canon. Through skilled editing, redubbing, and sound design, Obi-Wan becomes a deadbeat degenerate, Anakin Skywalker is now a respectable middle manager of a thriving business, and lightsaber duels are transformed into kaleidoscopic “dance fights” (a staple of this version of Star Wars). The last episode dropped yesterday; you can watch the whole ‘series’ here. After watching it all myself, I have no plans to watch the actual Obi-Wan Kenobi series. Nor do I feel a need to. It’s just that good. Which is what I’ve come to expect from Auralnauts.