Fanboys

A 2009 film, set in late 1998, about a bunch of highly devoted Star Wars fans who break into George Lucas's Skywalker Ranch to steal a print of The Phantom Menace. It is essentially a Road Movie, factoring in how they plan on infiltrating the filmmaking fortress and other, more benign or traditional, mishaps.

Despite the characters being specifically die-hard Star Wars fans (who like to mock Star Trek fans), the movie is a tribute to the fandom of every pop culture phenomenon in all their incarnations, including Fan Dumb, Unpleasable Fanbase, They Changed It, Now It Sucks and everything else.

Tropes used in Fanboys include:
  • Acting for Two: Seth Rogen plays both the head Trekker and a pimp who is a fan of Star Wars. At one point the two get in a fight.
  • Actor Allusion: Linus reciting some of Princess Leia's dialogue from the original films, to a doctor played by Carrie Fisher.
    • Ray Park, the stuntman/martial artist extraordinaire who played Darth Maul in The Phantom Menace plays a security guard in this film who quips: "Time for you to get mauled, boy." whilst twirling around a quarterstaff in the manner of the double-bladed lightsaber.
  • All Bikers Are Hells Angels
  • Berserk Button: "Nobody calls Han Solo a bitch!"
  • Bittersweet Ending: Linus has died from cancer, but Eric now writes & draws his own comic series, Hutch has started his own car detail business, and Zoe & Windows are together.
    • And not to forget, they get the full frontal assualt of the Dork Age of Star Wars in general.
  • Brick Joke: Midway through his interrogation of the main characters, Lucas's chief of security stops mid-sentence and asks if William Shatner had given them the plans for the Ranch.
  • The Cameo: Featuring appearances by Star Wars actors, Carrie Fisher as a doctor, Billy Dee Williams as Judge Reinhold, and Ray Park as a security guard.
  • Celebrity Paradox: This is probably the biggest gleeful celebration of this trope - by including above-mentioned Star Wars actors as different characters in their cameos, it rips a hole in the space-time continuum and is all the more fun for it.
  • Cool Car: Hutch's customised van, Slave 2. It even has an R2 unit on the roof.
  • Conversational Troping: When Eric reaches his Despair Event Horizon, a large part of why he's talked into continuing with the trip is Hutch mentioning the Crowning Moment of Awesome, referred to here as the "Death Star Moment".
  • Crowning Moment of Awesome: Breaking into the Skywalker Ranch, and evading security long enough to find Lucas's memorabilia room and the tough cut of The Phantom Menace. Lucas's chief of security outright expresses how impressive it was, and it is discussed as such in the above mentioned Conversational Troping scene.
  • Development Hell: The cancer storyline led to many push backs in the release of the movie, the studio couldn't decide whether or not to keep it but ultimately did.
  • Did Not Do the Research: The lead Trekker defends Captain Picard's sexuality by saying that his accent is because he's British, rather than effeminate. While Patrick Stewart is British, Picard is in-fact French.
    • There are several other instances of oversights that are generally really tiny errors, but that die-hard fans might be outraged at. Case in a point, a large Tauntaun action figure is visible on the shelf for a long scene - this figure was released in 2002, as evidenced by the packaging which proves it was from the "Saga" line released in 2002 - and the film is set in 1998.
      • Could be Fridge Brilliance, as the film is essentially a salute to the fandom's obsession and could've deliberately included some discrepancies as Easter Eggs for them to look for.
  • Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": Windows
  • Executive Meddling: Out the wazoo.
  • Fandom Rivalry: Star Wars vs Star Trek. At one point the protagonists engage a bunch of Trekkies in a fight.
  • Fan Service: Kristen Bell wearing the legendary Slave Leia bikini. Need I say more?
  • Five-Man Band:
  • Hey, It's That Guy!:
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: A subversion, as it's deliberately invoked with characters talking about how awesome Jar Jar's going to be.
    • On top of that, the thug they're talking to already got himself a permanent Jar Jar Binks tattoo!
  • Humble Goal: To see The Phantom Menace before it opens, because Linus is going to die before then.
  • Hypocrite: The lead Trekkie, who criticises Darth Vader for having an asthma problem, something he claims no Star Trek character has as it's a sign of weakness, is of course asthmatic.
  • Hypocritical Humor: Eric tells Linus that he lives in the real world, where he can't waste his life arguing about whether or not "Luke has a thing for Leia"... At which point, they get into that very argument.
    • The feud between the Trekkies and the main characters has each side mocking the favored franchise of the other...and demonstrating a considerable amount of awareness and knowledge of the rival franchise in the process. Actually both sides present a perfect example of Stealth Fandom.
  • Insistent Terminology: It's a carriage house.
    • The lead Trekkie briefly tries to get Linus to stop using "Trekkie" as a derogatory term, by saying the term is "Trekker".
    • Played with for the escort girls.

Windows: They're hookers!
Girl: We're escorts.
Windows: What's the difference?
Girl: I don't know.

  • Jedi Mind Trick: Hutch tries using it to get Zoe take her top off; he later tries it on the girl he picked up in Vegas, and is thrilled when it seems to work. Of course, it turns out she's an escort, Hilarity Ensues.
  • The Ladette: The character of Zoe plays with this trope - she understands the terminology and is friends with the guys and even moons a pursuer, but as a socially-well-adjusted, normal (and pretty) girl, she's not "one of the guys" in the strictest sense of the term.
  • Last-Name Basis: Hutch.
  • Mexican Standoff: See Put Down Your Gun and Step Away
  • Nitro Boost: Parodied when it doesn't work the first time, then they keep pressing the button until they literally go into lightspeed... then crash.
  • Not Distracted by the Sexy: Zoe flashes Windows with no reaction in order to demonstrate how nothing can distract him when he's in his Nerd Zone.
    • An non-sexual example - When the Trekkies find Eric & Linus in Vegas, they're so fixated on revenge that they completely miss that William Shatner himself is standing right there in conversation with them.
  • Oh Crap: "What if the film sucks?"
  • Percussive Maintenance: As a Shout-Out to how Han Solo fixes the Millenium Falcon.
  • Present Day Past: There are some snippets of 90's tech thrown in, but there isn't too much else to really distinquish the modern day with only 8 years ago. In particular, the Star Wars fans are seen wielding the ForceFX Lightsabers, which didn't come out until 2002. The telescoping plastic, lightbulb-illuminated one was the only one available at the time, which is also used. Also, Hutch's lightsaber is Anakin Skywalker's, which didn't come out until 2005.
    • Somewhat puzzling is the opening crawl, which narrates from an unspecified date. The crawl concludes with "sent from my iPhone." Since the iPhone was released in 2007 and The Phantom Menace in 1999, it would only make sense that the narrative is from a 2007-2009 perspective.
  • Put Down Your Gun and Step Away: At one point Linus tries a this on the Lucas Ranch guards with a valuable prop from the movies. The guard, in turn, grabs a different prop and threatens to destroy that in turn. The main characters being fanboys, they back down.
  • Refuge in Audacity: George Lucas, over the phone, is so impressed that they got past security he pardoned them and allowed Linus a personal screening of the movie.
  • Road Movie
  • Schmuck Bait: This piece of dialogue.

Hutch: What's the Klingon for "I'm going to die a virgin"?
Admiral Seasholtz: [Replies in fluent Klingon before he catches himself and yells an expletive.]

  • Seinfeldian Conversation: Again, the lengthy dispute between Linus and Eric about Luke and Leia.
  • Self-Serving Memory: When the guys are laughing about the fight with the Trekkies, Windows tried to paint himself as more heroic than he was... And when it's pointed out that he was just getting his ass kicked, he claims he was "channeling Emperor Palpatine" - The other guys quickly mock him about this, saying that Palpatine never called for a time out.
  • Shipping: Eric ships Luke/Leia. Linus is squicked by this.
  • Shout-Out: To Star Wars, obviously.
    • There's a deleted scene in which Eric tells the guards at the Skywalker Ranch entrance that his name is Iñigo Montoya.
    • The uniforms the security guards at Skywalker Ranch wear are the exact same ones the robot police officers wear in THX 1138, George Lucas' first film.
    • In a fight Linus bites someones ear off. It's a fake ear, but still...
    • The above fight is a homage to/parody of fight scenes from the original Star Trek, from the lirpa weapons to the double-fisted hammerblow.
  • Something Only They Would Say/Something They Would Never Say: The interrogation, where the people at Skywalker Ranch try to prove that our heroes are in fact fanboys.
    • Also invoked by Harry Knowles, for the same reasons.
  • Storming the Castle: The climax features the fanboys and fangirl infiltrating George Lucas' Skywalker Ranch compound and repeatedly evading capture...well, for a while anyway
  • Suspiciously Similar Song: The film's theme is one of the main Star Wars theme. Averted, when it comes to the instances where one of the films is being played within the movie.
  • Take That: To Trekkies. Not Star Trek fans in general, but rather the obsessive ones who learn Klingon & hold shrines to James T. Kirk in Riverside, Iowa due to its status as his future birthplace. They're generally portrayed as unlikable, with the joke that even Viacom wants nothing to do with them & has actually forbade them from using any Star Trek costume, prop or character likenesses under threat of lawsuit.
  • Tempting Fate: When the protagonists are having a discussion about Harrison Ford and how they believe him to be the greatest actor of all time, we see them drive past a billboard for Six Days Seven Nights just after it's declared that he's never been in a bad film.
  • Troubled Production: More like Troubled Post Production or Release Hell. The film was mostly completed by early 2006, but failed to find distribution despite a strong internet interest laregly because of the subject material (everyone on the internet is a fanboy). It made it out in 2009 edited to make it more "mainstream."
  • What Could Have Been: The conference room scene, where the group are told Linus could see the film originally took place in a room resembling the conference room in The Empire Strikes Back where Vader captures Leia & Han. A reshoot saw the room change & the head of security be other Marty-ed be Danny McBride.
    • Harvey Weinstein bought the rights to the film, he recut the film to remove the plotpoint of Linus having terminal cancer. The fandom was not happy, nicknamed him "Darth Weinstein and started a campaign to keep it in the film. The cancer was kept, but some scenes that brought it to the forefront have remained exiled from the final release.
    This article is issued from Allthetropes. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.