Four years in the making, creator Paul "OtaKing" Johnson says he worked on it on weekends, inspired by Lucasarts' 1994 TIE Fighter game. How is Johnson able to post this sort of thing, using Star Wars imagery and trademarks? Well, Lucasfilm has long encouraged fans to create non-canon short films within the far, far away Star Wars universe.

The earliest example of this is the Star Wars/COPS parody, Troops. In fact, there are official awards for fan-created films, although there are some pretty hard-and-fast rules including "Avoid bad language, rude gestures, and other inappropriate stuff," "5 minutes max!" and, of course, "Please do not include any references to Star Trek�."