Sunday, April 5, 2009

Hardware Wars

The most profitable short film of all time... Hardware Wars - complete with (a brown) cookie monster as Chewbacca!:



Some info from Wikipedia :

"Hardware Wars was written and directed by San Francisco native Ernie Fosselius and produced by Michael Wiese. It was structured as a mock-movie trailer, and Fosselius even secured narration from veteran voice-over artist Paul Frees, who provided the voice work for the original Star Wars trailers. Fosselius capitalised on his budget limitations by using deliberately ridiculous household objects as props; spaceships were represented with such items as steam irons, toasters and cassette recorders, and the lightsaber of "Fluke Starbucker" was an electric torch (flashlight). The characters, played by actors who were just as low-budget as the props, were also parodied in name and appearance; for example, Chewbacca the wookiee was replaced by "Chewchilla the Wookiee Monster," an obvious Cookie Monster puppet with a brown dye-job, and Darth Vader's counterpart, "Darph Nader," wore a welding helmet that distorted his voice so much that no one could understand anything he said. Other notable characters include "Ham Salad," "Augie Ben Doggie," "Princess Anne-Droid," and the drones, "4Q2" (who resembles the Tin Woodsman from the Wizard of Oz) and "Arty Deco" (an antique canister vacuum cleaner).
Hardware Wars won over 15 first place film festival awards including the award for Most Popular Short Film at the Chicago Film Festival. It is considered to be the most profitable short film of all time, grossing US$1,000,000 as compared to its paltry US$8,000 budget (a much better profit ratio than Star Wars itself). George Lucas said in a 1999 interview on the UK's Big Breakfast TV show that Hardware Wars was his favorite Star Wars parody."

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