Beer or beer not. There is no try.
The wild (and deeply capitalistic) world of beer-based brazenness was set on a crash course with the Star Wars franchise this month. To be clear, this collision was actually set in motion in the early 2000s, at which point the airing of the original trilogy titles (A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi) in Chile appears to have carried with it the uniquely unsettling, and just as uniquely hilarious, editing in of Cerveza Cristal beer bottles.
"They stiched the commercials into the films themselves," Twitter user @heyitswindy wrote over the weekend when gleefully sharing an example of one such moment, albeit with English dialogue added back in.
In the shared clip, seen below and/or above, a pivotal A New Hope conversation between Obi Wan Kenobi and Luke Skywalker builds to the startling conclusion of, you guessed it, a close-up on a beer grab.
Of course, given the current state of, well, everything, one should most certainly approach a story of this kind with a high level of skepticism. While subsequent memery built on the initial idea by further inserting the beverage into additional Star Wars titles, resulting in a few widely shared clips that never actually aired and are not part of the ad campaign itself, an article from the Guardian in June 2004 confirms the original clips that started this ongoing wave of jokes are indeed real.
In fact, the OMD Santiago agency was reported at the time to have won the Grand Prix award at the 2004 Cannes International Advertising Festival for "managing to persuade Chile's broadcasters to allow Cristal Beer to be placed in scenes within a series of major movies," including Star Wars titles.
Whether you believe this is an example of the dark side of the Force scoring a victory in real life or not, feel free to enjoy (or ignore!) a selection of revelatory beer tweets below. As you'll notice, the general public has taken it upon themselves to also start adding in Cerveza Cristal spots to other familiar franchises.
