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.
Fanboys provides examples of:
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.
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."
Bittersweet Ending: George Lucas allows Linus — and only Linus — to see the movie early. Time Skip to the release of the film and Linus has died from cancer, but Eric now writes & draws his own comic series, Hutch has started his own car detailing business, and Zoe & Windows are together.
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.
Crowning Moment of Awesome:invoked Breaking into the Skywalker Ranch, and evading security long enough to find Lucas's memorabilia room and the rough 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.
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.
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 Lad-ette: 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.
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.
Eric, Linus & Hutch have this reaction when they realise that Rogue Leader is a 10 year old girl. Windows follows suit when he puts his glasses back-on.
Present Day Past: There are some snippets of '90s tech thrown in, but there isn't too much else to really distinguish 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, which is also used, was the only one available at the time. 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-onwards 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.
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: Invoked, Eric ships Luke/Leia. Linus is squicked by this.
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.
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: For once, this is invoked, given the nature of this movie. The film's theme is one of the main Star Warstheme. 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 and set up 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.
Trekkie: As mentioned above, the gang runs into fanatical and borderline psychotic Star Trek fans.
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 largely because of the subject material (everyone on the internet is a fanboy). It made it out in 2009 edited to make it more "mainstream."
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 by 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.
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