"Star Wars" not only changed filmmaking and the movie industry forever, but it has inspired the real world in many ways — from dumb politicians and new technologies, to a religion, the naming of several organisms, a competitive sport, and more.
George Lucas created a vast world, a sandbox that has captured the imagination of people around the globe for nearly 50 years, one that others after him have only enhanced. Irvin Kershner and Lawrence Kasdan pushed forward the tone and the mythos with "Empire
Strikes Back," Timothy Zahn expanded what the universe could be with his books, Genndy Tartakovsky and later Henry Gilroy and Dave Filoni redefined what "Star Wars" could look like and the kind of stories it could tell in animation, and most recently, Tony Gilroy fulfilled the promise of the original movie by truly tapping into the politics that influenced Lucas back in the '70s — hitting a nerve in 2025 by confronting the darkest parts of our reality and reflecting it on screen.
And yet, as of this writing, arguably the most timely piece of "Star Wars" media that's actually impacting culture right now is not the one that directly calls out a genocide, but rather "Star Wars: The Clone Wars." That's because people online have adopted the term "clanker" used by clone troopers in the "Star Wars" universe in order to share their anger, anxiety, and indignation at artificial intelligence and robots in real life.
Read more: The 10 Best Movies Of All Time, According To IMDb
The Rise Of The Clanker
The term "clanker" was first introduced in the context of "Star Wars" in the 2005 video game "Star Wars: Republic Commando." There, one of the titular commandos, Sev, would often refer mid-combat to the droids you fight as "lousy clankers." It would continue to be used (by the same voice actor!) in the original "Battlefront II" game, but it wasn't until a few years later when the 3DCG cartoon "The Clone Wars" debuted that the term started rising in popularity.
Much like the games before it, it was clone troopers who commonly used the term to refer to the battle droids that composed the Separatist army. Obi-Wan even explains in a season 2 episode that the word is a shorthand term that describes the mechanical clanking sound made by the battle droids. It became as commonly used, if not moreso, as the swear "dank farrik" in "The Mandalorian."
The term was used within the "Star Wars" fandom for years, but remained quite niche. It wasn't until the summer of 2025 when the 2017 game "Battlefront II" became the surprise hit of the summer — thanks to the combination of the 20th anniversary re-release of "Revenge of the Sith," the popularity of "Andor," and "Star Wars" having a collaboration with "Fortnite" — that suddenly thousands of gamers getting very into the Republic vs Separatist conflict started calling the battle droid armies "clankers" in videos that went viral.
Very quickly, the term evolved from jokes and memes specifically about "Star Wars" to becoming a catch-all term for real-life robots like delivery robots, and eventually a rallying cry for people sick and tired of generative AI being everywhere.
Keep It Going, Troopers
Though the word had already been used to refer to robots before, like in a '50s article about "Metropolis," it makes sense that "Star Wars" would be at the forefront of this movement. After all, this is a franchise that's long had a complicated relationship with synthetic beings, with C-3PO and R2-D2 being sold into servitude just a few minutes after we first meet them, then kicked out of a cantina just for being droids. The sequels then gave us an entire army of faceless, dumb, useless droids that seemed to just occupy space.
In 2025, we're seeing the rise of AI as the new Silicon Valley-led fad that's been shoved down our throats, turning what could have been useful tools that helped ease menial tasks into a representation of everything wrong with billionaire bros. AI-generated images quickly went from a "cute" filter your grandma would use and share on Facebook without anyone caring to flooding our feeds on social media and making up a large portion of internet traffic thanks to AI-pushing bots owned by the same industrialists getting rich off AI usage while killing our culture, our brains, and our planet.
When it comes to the movies, we're seeing a pushback to Hollywood turning to AI as yet another cheap cost-cutting measure, the follow-up to the dreaded tax write-off. "The Studio" had a whole joke in an episode where Ice Cube leads a Comic-Con crowd in chanting "F*** AI!" in front of the head of a movie studio after it's discovered that they used AI in the animation of an upcoming movie. Even Disney, one of the most powerful studios around, was forced to scrap plans to implement AI in both the live-action "Moana" and "Tron: Ares" for fear of public backlash.
Keep it up. Let words turn into actions. The court of public opinion still holds sway. Don't let the clankers win.
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Read the original article on SlashFilm.
