The Imperial March

"The Imperial March," also known as Darth Vader's theme, is the brass-heavy leitmotif that plays whenever the Sith Lord strides into a scene across the Star Wars films, games and spinoff media3. Online, it works less as a joke format and more as a universal audio sting: drop the opening three notes under any clip and the subject instantly reads as a villain making an entrance.

The track is also one of the most-covered pieces of film music on YouTube, where it anchors a whole subgenre of novelty performances. Users have reinterpreted it as heavy metal shredding5, tapped it out on a single pencil7 and even trained a pet bird to whistle the melody6. Each new rendition tends to pile up millions of views on the strength of the recognition alone.

The common convention is to use the first four notes as a reaction cue: play them over a clip, GIF or photo of a person entering a room, a boss arriving at work or a pet walking toward the camera to frame them as the bad guy. On YouTube, the other typical move is the novelty cover, where the joke is the mismatch between the heavy orchestral original and the chosen instrument, be it a drum kit, a pencil tapped on a desk or a bird.