It’s hard to overstate just how much Red Letter Media has influenced the way the Internet talks about Star Wars. The Milwaukee-based production company—made up of Mike Stoklasa, Jay Bauman, the cherubic giggle of Rich Evans, and others—made its mark beginning in 2009 with a series of insightful, funny, and epic-length videos deconstructing the much-loathed Star Wars prequels. Years later, any message board or comment section devoted to a galaxy far, far away is sure to be littered with quotes from the so-called “Mr. Plinkett” videos, RLM-related memes, or GIFs of Evans in a Darth Vader mask, jerking off a droid.
So it only figures that RLM’s latest video, in which Stoklasa and Evans discuss their predictions for the upcoming The Force Awakens, should feel so spot-on. That’s a good and bad thing: There’s something both thrilling and a little bit deflating when you realize that, yeah, Rey is totally going to be Luke’s daughter, Kylo Ren is going to be Han and Leia’s turned-to-the-dark-side son, the new Death Star thing-y is going to be hidden inside a snow planet, and The Force Awakens is going to follow the same basic beats as A New Hope. And yeah, Finn is the one Rey is crying over in that final trailer.
The only thing Stoklasa and Evans obviously blow is their prediction that the desert planet seen in the trailers will be Tatooine. Nope, it’s already been confirmed as a new desert planet, Jakku, a fact that RLM wryly admits in the video’s YouTube description: “Yes. We now know it’s Jakku. Please do comment about it though.”