One of the most memorable moments in the entire Star Wars franchise happened at the end of 1980’s The Empire Strikes Back. During the famous lightsaber battle between Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker, Vader tries to lure Skywalker over to the dark side so that they can restore order to the galaxy together. Vader mentions that Skywalker’s late mentor, Obi-Wan Kenobi, never told Skywalker what happened to his father. “He told me enough,” Skywalker responds, “He told me you killed him.”
Everybody, of course, remembers what Vader says after that, right? It’s only one of the most quoted movie lines of all time—or should we say misquoted? We’ll give you a hint: It absolutely wasn’t “Luke, I am your father.” Close, but no cigar. The real line is “No, I am your father.”
It’s one of many examples of what people call the Mandela Effect. But did everyone who remembers it as “Luke, I am your father” really somehow make the same mistake? A lot of times, a parody can help fuel something like this, especially for people who might not have seen the original movie that’s being referenced. Case in point: Chris Farley doing his Darth Vader impression in 1995’s Tommy Boy:
“That was from Star Wars,” he says. Not quite, but there’s a definite argument for a movie as popular as Tommy Boy helping to spread a myth like this. Don’t get us wrong, it unquestionably did some damage. However, in 1983, when The Empire Strikes Back was adapted into a radio drama, the line was actually changed to “No, Luke, I am your father.” Check it out at the 3-hour and 14-minute mark below.
But are we to believe that Farley and the rest of the Tommy Boy crew were parodying the radio version and not the actual movie? That doesn’t sound right. It gets even more interesting, though. As Film Threat reported in 2020, the misquote can be traced back to HBO’s 6th Annual Young Comedians special, which aired the year after The Empire Strikes Back was released. At six minutes into the video below, comedian Rick Overton does his own Vader impression:
So, can we hang the blame on Overton for causing this decades-long confusion? At the end of the day, all of these things likely contributed to the line being misquoted throughout the years. But to be totally fair, Tommy Boy almost certainly had a lot more to do with it for folks who grew up in the 1990s and beyond—or at least the ones who weren’t seeking out three-and-a-half-hour audio versions of two-hour movies.
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