by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
This being a Vintage Sci-Fi movie night, of course there
wasn’t just one movie: there was also an episode of the early-1960’s cartoon
series The Jetsons (which I always liked
better than The Flintstones, by
the way — the future always turned me on a lot more than the past) which had
been screened there before, in which Cogswell, arch-rival of George Jetson’s
boss Spacely, is convinced Jetson has invented an anti-gravity machine when he
sees the Jetsons’ dog Astro fly and hover about in mid-air (all that’s happened
is Astro has swallowed a toy spacecar being flown by Jetson’s son Elroy) — and,
in tribute to the release last Friday of the seventh Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens (it should have been called The Hype Awakens!), we got to see the screamingly funny 1977 (imdb.com dates it as
1978, which was apparently the copyright date, but I’m sure I saw it before
that) Star Wars parody Hardware
Wars. Though it’s presented in the form of
a movie trailer, it’s actually 13 minutes long and a complete entertainment in
itself, and anyone who remembers the original Star Wars movie (still the only one of the seven made so far I’ve actually seen!)
will howl with recognition at the vividness of the parody. One imdb.com reviewer
went so far as to say Hardware Wars
was “the only top-notch Star Wars
parody out there” (no way! I happen to be an enormous fan of Mel Brooks’ Spaceballs), but while I wouldn’t give it that distinction it is a marvelous movie, though produced on such a
miniscule budget (estimated on imdb.com as $8,000, which is still twice as much
as Michael Paul Girard had to work with 17 years later to do the feature-length
Oversexed Rugsuckers from Mars!).
The producers, Michael Wiese and Ernie Fosselius (in the latter man’s honor the
production company logo was to “20th Century-Foss!”), wisely hired
veteran voice actor Paul Frees (most famous for his contributions to Rocky
and Bullwinkle and also the man who dubbed
Toshiro Mifune whenever a script called for Mifune to speak English), who’d
narrated an advance trailer for the real Star Wars and brought the right degree of breathless
pseudo-authority to the story of this epic. The gags are pretty simple — the
character names (“Fluke Starbucker,” “Augie ‘Ben’ Doggie,” “Princess
Anne-Droid,” “Ham Salad,” “Darph Nader” and the robots “4-Q-2” and “Artie
Deco”) are straight out of Mad
magazine territory, and instead of looking like the robot from Metropolis 4-Q-2 (the articulate one) looks like the Tin Man
from The Wizard of Oz. The Millennium
Falcon is a giant iron, and as it flies
through space it’s chased by an Imperial toaster that tries to annihilate it by
firing pieces of toasted bread at it. When the Empire’s Death Star blows up the
planet Basketball (represented by … well, you guessed it), Augie goes into
convulsions and Fluke asks him, “What is it, Augie Ben Doggie? Did you feel a
great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices cried out in terror
and were suddenly silenced?,” Augie replies, “No, just a little headache.” (In
the actual Mad parody of the
original Star Wars, the character
said, “No, it’s that we just lost the Best Picture Oscar to Annie
Hall.”) I remember that when I first saw Hardware
Wars I was at the apex of my love affair
with all things Wagner, and having been annoyed at how blatantly John Williams
had ripped off Wagner for his score for Star Wars, I thought it was an example of
turnabout-as-fair-play that Wiese and Fosselius scored their parody (“the first
Star Wars ‘fan film’,” the proprietor
of our screening called it) with real Wagner: a record of the “Ride of the Valkyries” from Die
Walküre played by the Württemberg
Philharmonic conducted by Jonel Perlea (a recording I was unable to find on the
usual online sources, by the way).
