Red Eyed C-3PO

Submission 9,217

Part of a series on Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. [View Related Entries]

About

Red Eyed C-3PO refers to a series of jokes, memes, theories and reactions to the appearance of the character C-3PO in the trailer for the 2019 science fiction action film Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. The character's eyes, which are traditionally gold, appear red in the trailer.

Origin

On August 26th, 2019, the official Star Wars YouTube account published a "Special Look" of the film Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker that included a shot of the character C-3PO (portrayed by Anthony Daniels) with red-colored eyes. The video received more than 12 million views in 24 hours (shown below).

Spread

Following the post, people online began joking about the design of C-3PO's eyes. C-3PO actor Anthony Daniels tweeted, ^[1] "Red is not just for arms…Red is not just for Christmas…Red is for…." The tweet received more than 13,000 likes and 2,100 retweets in 24 hours. Twitter^[2] user @AshleyEsqueda tweeted, "C3PO is now short for C3 Pissed Off." Within 24 hours, the tweet received more than 11,000 likes and 2,900 retweets (shown below, center).

Additionally, on the /r/SequelMemes subreddit Redditor ^[3] realgeneral_memeous shared a screenshot of C-3PO with a joke about red eyes caused by smoking cannabis. The post received more than 14,000 points (97% upvoted) and 95 comments (shown below, right).

Several media ouetlets covered the reaction and theories, including IGN,^[4] Mashable, ^[5] Inverse,^[6] Uproxx^[7] and more.