Star Wars: Episode V The Empire Strikes Back – “No, I am your father.”

The Hollywood Reporter ranks this immortal line from The Empire Strikes Back as the 11th most iconic film quote in history. Arguably, it should make the top 10, but the arguments don’t stop there. Since the stunning success of A New Hope (then called Star Wars) in 1977, people turned out in droves to see the 1980 sequel. Like The Godfather: Part 2, this is a rare sequel deemed better than the original, but its success and the amount of people who saw it created a strangely organic reinterpretation of the line in the minds of cinemagoers.

It’s agreed that during a fight in Cloud City, just before Darth Vader separates Luke Skywalker’s hand from his body with a lightsaber, Vader does say “I am your father”, but because of how many times the line has been quoted and requoted over the years, there’s some confusion about what word comes first. Many believe that the full line is, “Luke, I am your father.” It’s not. It’s “No, I am your father.”

As Urban Dictionary notes:

It is the pivotal plot twist in the movie and is usually misquoted in a feigned Darth Vader voice as “Luke, I am your father,” whenever someone named Luke introduces himself to a Star Wars fan. Star Wars purists maintain the full quote is actually “No, I am your father.”

Much like the “I see dead people” line in The Sixth Sense, which foreshadows that film’s twist, this phrase has persisted so long because of its attachment to the shocking revelation that the film’s villain is the film’s hero’s father. No one saw that coming. Not even George Lucas, who came up with the twist after A New Hope, in which Obi-Wan Kenobi tells Luke that Darth Vader killed his father.

“All this energy and all this storytelling that proceeded it was aimed at this tiny spot,” screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan told EW. In the same article, he recounts how he felt learning the twist (before explaining that even the cast were kept in the dark): “[George Lucas] said, ‘You know, Darth Vader is Luke’s father,’ and [Kasdan] said, ‘No s—?’ I was shocked and amazed.”

That amazement turned to pop cultural enshrinement. The line has been spoofed endlessly, from Austin Powers, Family Guy, Futurama to Toy Story 2, Space Balls, My Name is Earl, The Office, Modern Family, The Big Bang Theory, The Simpsons… the list is almost endless.