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Did you know?

In 1978, only seven months after Star Wars was released, a short film parody appeared in the theatres: Hardware Wars.

It was a low budget movie (budget of $8.000) directed by Ernie Fosselius. He shot the movie in 4 days using among others, household devices with visible wires, a Cookie Monster look-alike, and a Richard Wagner soundtrack.
Despite its low budget Hardware Wars won many film festival awards at that time. Apparently Mr Lucas himself said once that Hardware Wars was his favourite Star Wars parody (source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_Wars ). The movie is also considered to be the most profitable short film of all time, grossing a million US$, so having a profit ratio which was much better than Star Wars.


Ok, enough talk!

Imagine you were sitting in the audience back in 1978, a long time ago before Youtube was hosting thousands of Star Wars parodies, and you have never seen anything like this before. Now watch and enjoy the show....




EDIT: Changed Hard Wars into Hardware Wars in the thread title. LOL

@ the steam troopers and chewchilla!!!

I remember this! I saw I as a kid and laughed myself silly

That's fantastic, Carrie Fisher has some serious competition there
I wonder if the iron was the inspiration for Slave 1?

I remember this from when I was a kid and love it There is also a "Special Edition" parody version with updated CGI effects (though I don't think Fosselius had anything to do with it). By coincidence the old guy that lived behind us I was Ernie Fossilius's uncle. Fossilius also made a parody film of Apocalypse Now called "Porklips Now" which I don't think is nearly as funny.

Back in the early 80's HBO used to run a set of movie parodies in a half-hour block as a time filler that included Hardware Wars, Godzilla Vs Bambi, and another favorite Closet Cases of the Nerd Kind.

I loved this film so much that I named a band Fluke Starbukcer that I had from '94 - 2000. In the late 90s, while playing a show in Portland, we met Scott Mathews, the guy that played Fluke Starbucker. He was just as excited to meet us as we were to meet him. As luck would have it, he was not only a music producer, but lived just 30 miles from us in the San Francisco Bay Area. A few months later we met up and he produced a song of ours. It was Fluke Starbucker producing Fluke Starbucker. Here is an ancient interview where we talk about that experience. He's a really funny guy and we had a blast recording with him. He introduced us to Ernie Fosselius who had tons of stories of the making of Hardware Wars. Later we had the good fortune of getting to work with Ernie on a marionette video project at his home studio. Chewchilla the Wookie Monster still exists to this day. I have a photo somewhere of myself, Ernie and that puppet. That puppet and the hardware wars lunchbox used in TV interview that Ernie did are two gail pieces of mine...

Never knew of this really cool spoof, great fun thanks for sharing Marco. And Trevor what a great link up story about meeting and working with Scott Mathews.

Awesome.

Great background story, Trevor.

I hope you can find that picture with you, Ernie and Chewchilla and show it off here.

John, Dcarty: awesome that you have actually seen Hardware Wars as kids in the cinema at that time.