Star Wars fans rocked by resurfaced beer adverts stitched directly into the original trilogy – including a bizarre replacement for Luke Skywalker's lightsaber
May the beer be with you
We all remember that iconic Star Wars moment where Obi-Wan Kenobi goes to give Luke Skywalker his father's old, ice cold beer, right?
Well, if you watched a specific version of the movie shown in Chile, you might remember things that way. The old ads are going viral once again thanks to the fact that the beer marketing is spliced directly into some of the original trilogy's most famous moments – unintentionally creating the most hilarious advertising campaign ever.
While these videos might seem like fakes, they are very much real: according to The Guardian, the campaign even won an award for its ingenuity.
You can see more videos below, including one of Luke reaching for a beer on Dagobah, and Emperor Palpatine using the Force to summon a can.
Around 2003 in Chile, when the original trilogy of Star Wars began airing on television there, they did this funny thing to avoid cutting to commercial breaks. They stitched the commercials into the films themselves. Here is one of them, with the English dub added in. pic.twitter.com/wC7N2vPNvvMarch 2, 2024
Not everyone was a fan of the ads, though, with Lucasfilm filing a complaint about the campaign (see it under case 0601 here).
"I'd never heard of it, and it's fantastic," says one fan. "Above all, it explains how Palpatine somehow survived: with Cerveza Cristal."
"Normally, silence is golden at movie screenings," says Lucasfilm's creative art manager Phil Szostak. "But I would not be mad if fans started singing the Cerveza Cristal theme song at key moments in the original trilogy."
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"There are tears streaming down my face this is the most incredible thing I have ever seen," says someone else.
"Imagine only ever seeing this version of Star Wars and spending the rest of your life wondering why no one else knows what you’re talking about when you reference the scene where Obi-Wan hands Luke a Cerveza Cristal," says another person.
Next up for Star Wars is The Acolyte, which will reportedly be arriving on Disney Plus in June. In the meantime, The Bad Batch season 3 is currently releasing weekly.
Keep up to date with the galaxy far, far away with our guide to all the upcoming Star Wars movies and TV shows.
I'm a Senior Entertainment Writer here at 12DOVE, covering all things film and TV for the site's Total Film and SFX sections. I previously worked on the Disney magazines team at Immediate Media, and also wrote on the CBeebies, MEGA!, and Star Wars Galaxy titles after graduating with a BA in English.