Matt the Radar Technician

2016viral videoclassic

Published September 6, 2026

Matt the Radar Technician is Kylo Ren's undercover alias from a January 2016 Saturday Night Live sketch, in which Adam Driver's Star Wars villain infiltrates Starkiller Base wearing a blond wig and glasses to hear what his employees really think of him. The character escaped the parody within days and grew into a two-year run of custom action figures, in-character Tumblr posts, and a Star Wars Battlefront II mod scene that drew coverage from Kotaku and PC Gamer.

Overview

Matt the Radar Technician is defined by one very specific look: a floppy blond wig, thick black-framed glasses, and a plain gray Starkiller Base uniform, worn by a visibly sulking Adam Driver trying and failing to blend in with rank-and-file First Order techs1. The gag is that Matt is Kylo Ren in a paper-thin disguise, and every attempt to gather honest feedback about his own management style ends with him lightsaber-slashing a computer console or shoving a coworker across the room.

As a meme, Matt shows up in two lanes. Fans treat him as a legitimate Star Wars character in his own right, sculpting custom action figures, Funko Pops, and Battlefront skins, and running a long-lived Tumblr blog written from Matt's point of view3. In parallel, screenshots from the sketch feed image macros riffing on Matt's forced-cheerful introduction line and his awkward attempts to make small talk about radar equipment.

Origin & Background

Platform
Saturday Night Live (broadcast) / YouTube (viral spread)
Creator
Saturday Night Live
Date
2016

The character debuted on the January 16, 2016 episode of Saturday Night Live, in a filmed segment called 'Star Wars Undercover Boss: Starkiller Base'1. The bit was a straight parody of the CBS reality series Undercover Boss, casting Adam Driver's Kylo Ren as the executive who slips into a fake identity to see what his employees really think of him. The premise falls apart repeatedly, since Kylo cannot stop Force-choking colleagues or destroying consoles whenever a stormtrooper calls him whiny.

The official SNL upload of the sketch cleared 29 million YouTube views inside two years, and Matt's introduction line spread almost immediately as reaction bait3.

How It Spread

Fan crafts moved first. On January 19, 2016, custom toy maker Jim Heston briefly listed a hand-painted Matt the Radar Technician action figure through his Etsy shop 'Toy Addicts,' and an Imgur repost of the figure racked up more than 198,000 views over the following two years. Days later, an Instagram user posted a custom Funko Pop version of Matt, and a figurine post in r/StarWars gathered more than 7,400 upvotes3. A Tumblr blog at matt-the-radar-technician launched the same day the sketch aired and kept posting in-character updates from Matt's point of view for years.

Image macros followed in February 2016 on Imgflip, riffing on Matt's opening self-introduction and his cheerful non-answers about First Order work. The bigger second wave came almost two years later: on December 31, 2017, modder GameTSF uploaded a Matt the Radar Technician skin for Star Wars: Battlefront II that swapped out the game's unmasked Kylo Ren model2. A gameplay upload from the YouTube channel Star Wars HQ cleared 100,000 views inside five days5. Kotaku called the modded Matt 'shredded, and definitely not a punk bitch'2, while PC Gamer covered the swap alongside the era's 'Darth Vader in Pink' mod and noted the arcade-only limitation4.

How to Use This Meme

Typical Matt jokes lean on the visual: pair a still of Adam Driver's blond, bespectacled Matt with a caption that pretends he is a real First Order employee, or drop the introduction line ('Hi, my name is Matt, I'm a radar technician') over any awkward workplace scenario. The other common convention is to treat Matt as a canonical Star Wars character, whether that means building a custom figure, modding him into a game, or running an in-character social account that never breaks the bit.

Frequently Asked Questions