An obscure Bay Area filmmaker launched an empire in 1977. No, not that one. Fluke Starbucker, Oggie Ben Doggie, Ham Salad and Princess Anne-Droid are back in a "special edition" of the original Lucas spoof.
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away — well, in an abandoned French laundry in San Francisco in 1977 — a group of rebel filmmakers equipped with only a well-stocked toolshed and a super-8 camera set out to spoof what was becoming the greatest fantasy-film franchise of all time. The resulting parody was a short film called “Hardware Wars,” and it stuck it to “Star Wars” in every way possible (or at least in every way that was possible in 12 minutes of running time on next to no budget).
Steam irons and toasters suspended by clearly visible strings were the spaceships, a basketball was a planet on the brink of destruction, and the robot Artie Decko was a defunct vacuum cleaner. As George Lucas touts the digital back lot on which his current “Clone Wars” trilogy is being made, “Hardware Wars” only becomes more poignant. With its release on DVD, this “sprawling space saga of romance, rebellion and household appliances” has returned to remind us just how funny crumpled tinfoil can really be.
“Hardware Wars” was the brainchild of writer-director Ernie Fosselius, who already had an array of satirical short subjects under his belt. The most notable of those was “The Hindenburger,” which depicted a flying Big Mac bursting into flames over a cardboard New Jersey while a spastic radio announcer (Fosselius) shamelessly decried “the humanity of it all.” Documentary filmmaker and author Michael Wiese got behind “Hardware Wars” as its producer.
“I used to hold these shadow-play parties in my loft,” Wiese recalls while taking a break from scouting locations in Indonesia for an upcoming film. “One evening Ernie came over and performed an impromptu shadow play of ‘Jaws,’ which he just made up on the spot. He was hilarious.
“We had both already made a handful of short films,” Wiese continues, “so we talked about doing a film together. At a Chinese restaurant, while waving the condiments and chopsticks over his head like spaceships, Ernie pitched me a parody of Hollywood coming attractions that would take on big-budget special-effects movies. He said we could use household appliances for spaceships. Always one to stretch a dollar, I saw a great opportunity for doing more with less.”
With an $8,000 budget supplied by Laurel Polanick (who was also the film’s costume designer), “Hardware Wars” was shot in four days in bars, beaches and garages around the San Francisco Bay Area. Surprisingly, production was started only a short time after “Star Wars” was released. Although single-screen theaters across the country had lines wrapping around the block to see the science-fiction spectacular, nobody in the “Hardware Wars” cast was aware that they were poking fun at what would soon become an enduring cultural icon.
“I had no idea what Ernie was talking about,” Scott Mathews says after a mix-down session at his Mill Valley, Calif., recording studio. “I’m just starting to get it now.”
Mathews donned a lopsided blond wig for the starring role of Fluke Starbucker. Today he is a platinum-selling record producer who has worked with everyone from Barbra Streisand to John Lee Hooker and even an Oakland indie rock band named for his “Hardware Wars” character.
“I think a lot of the charm of that movie is the fact that we didn’t really know what we were doing,” Mathews adds. “It was cinéma vérité at its finest. I’m sitting there spaced out and cracking up in some of those scenes.”
Cindy Freeling, who played Princess Anne-Droid with cinnamon rolls attached to her head, was equally oblivious to the “Star Wars” phenomenon. “I was in an altered state when I saw ‘Star Wars’ for the first time,” she confesses. “It was the ’70s, you know. When I went back and saw ‘Star Wars Special Edition,’ it dawned on me why we had all of this stuff in ‘Hardware Wars.’”
From its cardboard sets to the costumes, “Hardware Wars” is an amazing facsimile of its source material, despite obvious budget and time constraints. Fluke, the Princess, Oggie Ben Doggie and Ham Salad all look like slightly off-kilter versions of their “Star Wars” counterparts. “One hundred percent of any of that effect goes to Ernie and his direction,” Mathews says.
Another coup for Fosselius was getting veteran voice actor Paul Frees to perform the film’s “coming attractions”-style narration. Frees’ deep tones can be heard in such film classics as “Some Like It Hot” and the original “Time Machine” as well as a plethora of cartoons, commercials and movie trailers. Producer Wiese still feels the impact that Hollywood’s “Man of a Thousand Voices” had on their short: “His voice is so rich that you actually think you are seeing ‘incredible space battles’ when in fact it’s only a Fourth of July sparkler.”
After “Hardware Wars” was released, it became the same kind of success in the short-film market that “Star Wars” was among major motion pictures. In 1978, the little movie grossed $500,000, placing it among the most successful shorts of all time.
Over the years the usually litigious Lucas has actually expressed his enjoyment of “Hardware Wars,” calling it a “cute little film.” It’s the only non-Lucasfilm product to be sold in Star Wars Insider magazine. The short enjoys the same semi-endorsed status as the subsequent subgenre of homemade “fan films” to which Lucas has recently given the nod, even hosting a Sci-Fi Channel special about them. Fosselius’ space-toaster epic, with its gutsy, zero-budget approach, is probably just as much an inspiration for many of these Jedi-addled amateur filmmakers as Lucas’ two trilogies.
Despite Lucas’ blessing, Wiese got a different reaction from a group of 20th Century Fox executives when he showed them his movie.
“A meeting was arranged with Alan Ladd Jr., who at the time was the head of Fox,” Wiese recalls. “I went down to L.A. with my 16-millimeter print of the film. I think it was the first time I’d been in a studio, and I was very nervous. I was ushered into a super-plush screening room with the huge overstuffed velvet chairs. Mr. Ladd — ‘Laddie’ to his friends — was seated, and behind him were three lawyers in expensive suits. It was the worst screening I’ve ever endured. No one made a sound during the movie. Someone coughed once and I thought it was a laugh, at least I hoped it was.
“After the screening, Laddie asked me, ‘Well, kid, so what do you want us to do?’ I said, ‘I want you to show this with ‘Star Wars.’ You know, make fun of your own movie!’ He said he’d get back to me, and I’m sure he will.”
After the success of “Hardware Wars,” Wiese and Fosselius resisted the temptation to produce more sci-fi spoofs. “At one time, someone did offer to finance a full-length feature of ‘Hardware Wars,’ but we passed,” Wiese says. “We always knew it was a one-joke movie and wouldn’t sustain that length. Of course that didn’t stop Mel Brooks from ‘quoting’ us — some might say ripping us off — with ‘Spaceballs.’”
Pyramid Films, the distributor of “Hardware Wars,” later released a “Close Encounters” parody called “Closet Cases of the Nerd Kind,” but the “Hardware Wars” crew was not involved with it. Instead, Fosselius turned his biting wit toward Coppola, writing and directing a sendup of “Apocalypse Now,” titled “Porklips Now.” The film lampoons “Hearts of Darkness,” Coppola’s longer “Apocalypse Now Redux,” and DVD commentary tracks, all before any of those things actually existed. It was also the last film directed by Fosselius.
Over the years “Hardware Wars” was relegated to being a fond celluloid memory — until 1997, when Lucas released digitally altered “special editions” of his original “Star Wars” trilogy as a way of showing off Lucasfilm’s new special-effects technology and hyping his upcoming prequels. With “Star Wars” invading the public consciousness again, Wiese decided it was time for a special edition of “Hardware Wars,” with even more Home Depot bric-a-brac digitized into each frame.
“Serendipity brought some ‘Hardware Wars’ fans, who were seven, nine and 12 years of age when the original came out, to my doorstep.” Wiese says. “They said they would like to work on a special edition and had some ideas. I thought they were terrific. It didn’t hurt that they also worked at Digital Domain [one of the leading effects houses in Los Angeles] and could sneak in there nights and weekends to render our stuff.”
Cindy Freeling attended a screening at the San Diego Comic-Con to promote the special edition and discovered a cult following she had never known about. “It was unbelievable,” she says. “The room was jampacked. There were people flowing out into the hall. The audience knew every single little detail of the movie. I’ve certainly seen ‘Hardware Wars,’ but I don’t have every frame memorized. Whenever a ‘special defect’ would come up, the whole audience would start cheering and clapping. They knew right when it was happening.”
Despite the fan reaction, not everyone was happy with the new version. “Ernie [Fosselius] was not involved with the special edition,” Wiese says candidly. “He didn’t like the approach, and asked that we put a ‘Not Approved by Ernie’ label on the videos, which we did. His notion — and I think, in retrospect, he was correct — was that the new scenes should not have been so highly rendered as they were, but cheesy and funky in keeping with the original.”
For the new DVD release of “Hardware Wars,” Fosselius himself worked to restore his revered satire to its original lack of grandeur, but he found that the studio technicians assisting him were as clueless about his film’s intent as those Fox execs were in the 1970s.
“There’s a great inside story about that,” Scott Mathews says, recounting a recent conversation he had with Fosselius. “When Ernie was transferring all the old footage from the original print, they had all this amazing gear where they could embellish it. They told Ernie that they could erase the strings! They weren’t checking with him: They were telling him they would be doing that in their transfer.
“Ernie tried to explain it. He said: ‘No, wait. We put extra strings on there so you could see them! There’s more light shining on the strings than there is on the flying iron!’ He got a kick out of it. These were the guys that he was collaborating with to make the next phase happen. And they don’t even get the premise of the original.”
Bob Calhoun is a California freelance writer who specializes in rock 'n' roll, martial arts and Hollywood stuntmen.
More Bob Calhoun.
I saw “Star Wars” on VHS originally when I was 6. I was just captivated. I would come home every day after school, and before I would do my homework, I would pop it in and watch it, because I was largely alone. Both my parents worked. I remember the play button being green, the pause button was red, and the way the top would pop up and you’d slide the tape in and clank it down. And I remember knowing every line.
As I grew, I began to see “Star Wars” as a metaphor for so much – whether it was the natural depravity of man, or the redemption of man, or the relationship between a father and a son in Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader. That relationship can be broken and redeemed over the course of the trilogy. I really related and connected with it, and it encapsulated a lot of what I want to teach my children – people make mistakes, and they can ultimately be redeemed, even if those mistakes seem egregious, you know, in Darth Vader’s case. That there is a choice to be made between what side you choose in life. Our faith is a big part of our family, so the Force has special meaning for me. There’s just so many things that I think my son would get, that I hope my son would get.
Eli is 5 now, and we’ve watched the first one, but I want it to be a rite of passage – and I want to make sure that I watch it with him. So every year, it’s the next one. He’ll look forward for a whole year to his 6th birthday and “The Empire Strikes Back.” When he turns 7, we’ll watch “Return of the Jedi.” And then we’ll probably start them over. Those first three films were just so pure. (I won’t show him the other ones until later. This is about the three that I grew up with.)
My dog was named Luke Skywalker. Even now when I come out to pitch, they play the “Imperial March.” So I have had some good times with it. The thing that resonates with me, that I want my son or my daughters to cling to, is just that quintessential human emotion of hope that runs through every episode. In fact, I think the title of the very first one is “A New Hope.” I want to be able to communicate that to my son – the essence of what hope is and how you see it played out in the movies. But there’s so much more there. It sets the stage for great conversation. It’s very relatable. Hey, remember when Luke was tempted by the dark side in “Star Wars”? Well, you know — it happens. Here are some ways to deal with it. So it’s perfect.
My favorite is “The Empire Strikes Back,” when Luke finds out who his father really is, and is destroyed by it, just utterly dejected. But his whole being is not destroyed – there’s still hope. That scene: I know there’s still good in you. There’s good in you. I sense it. And, of course, as a kid I remember liking all the fights and the spaceships — all that just makes your imagination go.
When you’re young and in the moment, you’re captivated by the pure entertainment value. I wanted to be Luke Skywalker. I wanted a Princess Leia on my side. But as I grew, I saw it through a different lens. You see so many movies, and you might take something from one, but most you just forget about. What’s neat about “Star Wars,” the trilogy, is that I’ve reflected on that hundreds and hundreds of times, especially since growing into an adult and thinking about life lessons that are relatable and why people develop the way they do. It certainly motivated me to think beyond the box.
My girls are 10 and 8, and they’ve both seen the trilogy. Sometimes I feel like a professor teaching the same class. What’s great now is that we own them, of course. We have them all in HD — we’re not watching them on a scratchy, grainy VHS like I had to all those years ago.
There are a few great universal truths. People love “Star Wars.” People love making videos. (Just ask the Star Wars Kid.) When in 2009, Vimeo developer Casey Pugh challenged fans to “remake ‘Star Wars: A New Hope’ into a fan film, 15 seconds at a time,” he got an outpouring of beautiful animated sequences, stop-motion extravaganzas, and a lot of people in their living rooms, wearing hoodies. So many hoodies. The final product became “Star Wars Uncut,” an addictively compelling low-fi reimagining of the classic that went on to win a 2010 Emmy for interactive media, besting websites for “Glee” and “Dexter.”
Now, a year and a half after its Emmy win, “Star Wars Uncut” is getting yet another wave of glory. On Jan. 18, a “Director’s Cut” of “hand-picked scenes from the entire StarWarsUncut.com collection” was uploaded onto YouTube, the entire movie rolled into one gloriously weird, 473-scene work that spans from a Twitter update of “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away” to a closing credits sequence with more names on it than a Korean cartoon. In other words, it’s the “Star Wars” you always dreamed of – one featuring your childhood action figures, several bottles of Jim Beam, flying bow ties, and a box of ferrets. If you don’t have two hours to blow watching the whole kaboodle, check out the Star Wars Uncut site, where you can access individual scenes, along with their originals from the film. Fair warning: Once you find Chewbacca’s character page, you’re in for no less a time suck.
In a world where messing around with copyrighted material could, as Andrew Leonard explained recently, “get an entire website shut down,” a treasure like “Star Wars Uncut” — as well as other crowd-sourced gems like the Grammy-nominated Johnny Cash Project — might well become extinct. Fortunately, back in 2010, “Uncut’s” creator Pugh told the New York Times that the notoriously touchy Lucasfilm had given its support to the project from its earliest days. Though he’s bound by a nondisclosure agreement, Pugh affirmed that “Lucasfilm isn’t out to make money on this, and neither am I.”
The lavish attention and effort so many individuals poured into a silly labor of love to one of the most lucrative films of all time speaks of great purity. They did it for no money. For no great glory. Just for the fun of doing something, sharing it with others, and seeing what they came up with as well. For the pleasure of putting a personal stamp on Princess Leia’s eye rolls and Han Solo’s winks. The end result is both insanely cute (that toddler with the Cinnabon hat at the eight minute mark will just about kill you dead) and often, oddly touching. Because within the rousing, rebellious spirit of “Star Wars” the Internet has found yet another way to celebrate the giddy, ragtag joy of collaboration.
“YOU CAN’T EVICT AN IDEA,” proclaim the banners fronting an otherwise dull building in east London, owned by banking giant UBS but inhabited and decorated by squatters from the Occupy movement. They’ve adapted the phrase from Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s graphic novel “V for Vendetta,” in which the titular terrorist explains his seeming immortality to a detective who has just shot him: “Ideas are bulletproof.” A poster of V’s trademark Guy Fawkes mask smiles eerily at all who walk into the foyer of 8 Sun Street, now dubbed “The Bank of Ideas” and used as a community center. The caption underneath reads, “We are the 99%, and so are you.”
It’s fitting that the Occupy movement should have drawn inspiration from dystopian fiction, an increasingly popular genre for teenagers and young adults in particular. If, as Time magazine suggests, the person of the year was the Protester, the publishing phenomenon was the Dystopia — the story of the dissenter in a repressive society who becomes a revolutionary. The new wave was led by two trilogies, both published from 2008-10: Suzanne Collins’ “Hunger Games” (whose big-budget Hollywood adaptation kicks off in March) and Patrick Ness’ “Chaos Walking” (now being adapted by Lionsgate). Scores of other books and series are now rising in their wake. “V for Vendetta,” from 1988, is an important antecedent, telling the tale of Evey, an adolescent girl in a run-down future London who, indoctrinated by the self-styled freedom fighter V, becomes a thorn in the side of a fascist state. Toward the end of the 2006 film adaptation, hordes of the working class – the 99 percent, if you will – don the Fawkes masks themselves and, led by Evey, stand firm against their oppressors.
Since the film’s release, replicas of these masks have been manufactured widely, and Occupy protesters in the U.S. and the U.K. have often worn them (as have members of the hackers collective Anonymous), both to disguise their faces and show solidarity. But the film is an odd, Hollywood-ized work that the iconoclastic Moore has typically dismissed. In contrast, his book is philosophically more complex than is often acknowledged. Unlike propaganda, literature is difficult to adopt as a template by movements of any stripe, and such is the case with “V for Vendetta.” V is, despite his protestations, is more than just an embodied idea: He’s an ideology, and this makes him dangerous to both the ruling elite and his own followers. And if there’s anything we can learn from dystopian literature, including the work of Collins and Ness, it’s that ideologies can, and should, be evicted.
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There’s no necessary cause-and-effect relationship between world events and publishing phenomena, but there can certainly be a resonance. Suzanne Collins has said that “The Hunger Games” was inspired in part by coverage of the war in Iraq — and yet it raises issues of economic inequality, misinformation and corporate greed that are even more relevant now. Collins’ heroine, Katniss Everdeen, is an independent and even ornery 16-year-old who saves her younger sister by volunteering for, and then winning, a telecasted fight-to-the-death competition. Though her feats of derring-do have elements of escapist fantasy, her ultimate goal isn’t to win the Games, but to avoid exploitation: She wants to circumvent the rules and figure out a way to shut down the games for good. Just as Collins and other writers of young-adult dystopias cleave to the Romantic nostalgia for childhood freedom, they’re raising the stakes of the coming-of-age novel’s traditional struggles with the pressures of growing up and the need to integrate with society. In these dystopias, integration means the death of freedom and imagination, and subjugation to a way of thinking that curbs creativity and stresses survival of the least scrupulous.
The societies depicted in these novels generally fall into one of two broad categories. In the first, as in “Hunger Games,” Ally Condie’s “Matched” (2010-12) and Veronica Roth’s “Divergent” (2011), they’re dystopias masquerading as utopias, where everyone is supposedly provided for through work assignments that keep the plebs docile and benefit the ruling elite. In the second, as in “Chaos Walking” and Jeff Hirsch’s Collins-blurbed “The Eleventh Plague” (2011), they’re post-apocalyptic settlements where the physically strongest and best-organized have taken power and bent all to their will.
All of these books feature adolescent protagonists of generally unimposing physical stature who, at a crucial point in their lives (usually an adult-initiation process of some kind), reject the limited choices they’re offered and learn self-sufficiency instead. They pull together support from other outsider teens and some adults (especially lapsed countercultural hippie-types who remember pre-dystopian life), and make difficult decisions that open the door to a new and better way of life. Thus, they avert catastrophe and avoid the trap of the minimum-wage, dead-end job – or its near-future equivalent.
The formula for self-sufficiency is a familiar one: The protagonists need to rough it, to live for a time off the land as early colonists did, escaping the dystopias’ infantilizing control and surveillance. This connects them with nature both literally and symbolically, putting them in touch with their inner noble savages. From the start of “The Hunger Games,” Katniss hunts with a bow and arrow in the forbidden wild; later, she becomes known as the Mockingjay, after a species of bird who lives there. In “Crossed,” the sequel to Ally Condie’s “Matched,” the protagonist, having lived all her life in suburbia so sanitized it makes Disneyland look like Bangkok, bolts to a Grand Canyon-like back country to join her dark, brooding outsider boyfriend (the opposite of her society’s chosen match for her, who is of course blonde – even in the future, love triangles will keep young hearts aflutter). There, she learns personal independence through physical effort.
But they’re not quite noble savages, because they’re self-aware. In the wild, they find misfits who safeguard learning, hoarding the books and lore that the dystopias have repressed. The Occupy movement often casts itself in a similar light, as its members “rough it” in parks in the middle of cities as if keeping alive a more earthy, simple, honest way of living; their library tents symbolize their devotion to learning from the past as they forge a better way for the future. Indeed, the library is a synecdoche for the movement itself: in Toronto, protesters chained themselves to theirs as it was about to be removed as part of the camp’s eviction; at Occupy Wall Street, the demolishing of the library has been viewed as a repressive dystopian act.
In the wilderness, the dystopian protagonists also encounter rebels – and not necessarily the same people who read books. Unlike in escapist fantasies such as “Star Wars,” where the rebels unambiguously deserve our support as they fight an evil empire with the light side of the force, the rebels in YA dystopias can be as dangerous as those in power. Often the two are mirror images of one another, led by charismatic but delusional figures who seek to wrest power for themselves by violent means and view the teenage heroes as vehicles for them to do so. In “The Hunger Games,” Katniss becomes an icon for the rebels in the legendary District 13 but ultimately distrusts their humorless and pathologically driven leader, Alma Coin; in “Chaos Walking,” Viola (Todd’s girlfriend and female counterpart) falls in with The Answer, a group of terrorists who are healers by profession but are just as adept at setting off bombs, and wouldn’t blink at blowing her up if it achieved their own ends.
The heroes are called upon to navigate between dystopian rulers and rebel would-be-dystopian-rulers; as champions of democracy, they pull together disparate disenfranchised groups in ragtag bands that become as strong as the sum of their parts. In doing so, they demonstrate the power of not being “confined to one way of thinking,” – a phrase used by the mother of the heroine in the pointedly-titled “Divergent,” shortly before she’s violently killed by a zombified soldier. Homogenization is the enemy – which is why it’s odd to find so many Occupy-movement protesters wearing the V mask.
Like the new YA dystopias, Moore and Lloyd’s “V for Vendetta” highlights problems with rebels who have the same aptitude for violence, disregard for collateral damage and distrust of nuanced world-views as the dystopias they fight. V is a vigilante revolutionary for whom any ends justify his means. He takes Evey under his wing as he attacks members of London’s ruling elite, and when she balks at killing people, he then “kidnaps” her and, in disguise as a police officer, tortures her, effectively breaking her down to nothing and then building her back up again in his own revolutionary image. This is the ur-terrorist narrative, which upholds the belief that each person must be shattered and remade to serve a purpose, in order that the same may be done to civilization itself. It’s the strategy employed, in “Chaos Walking,” by the dystopian Mayor Prentiss as well as the opponent he brands a “terrorist,” the bombing-happy healer Mistress Coyle. But neither can ultimately control the book’s dual protagonists, Todd and Viola, whereas in the even darker “V for Vendetta,” Evey becomes V’s disciple, blowing up 10 Downing Street and offering the citizens of London a choice between “lives of your own and a return to chains” – apparently she has read her Rousseau. The bloodthirsty version of freedom she offers them is more savage than noble, and itself suggests another form of imprisonment. The book ends not with the triumphant Evey but rather with the consistently questioning Inspector Finch, who wanders off alone outside London, into darkness and the unknown, rather than choosing one of two unattractive sides.
Finch refuses to let others think for him. He, not Evey, is the analogue to Todd and Viola in “Chaos Walking,” whose strategy of avoiding violence unites their people as well as other species on the planet. In “The Hunger Games,” Katniss ultimately undermines the regimes of both President Snow and Alma Coin, throwing her society into disarray but perhaps helping to usher in what one character calls “the evolution of the human race.” In “Divergent,” where a future society is split up into factions based on personality traits, Tris grows up as Abnegation (forsaking herself), undergoes initiation as Dauntless (having no fear), and saves both factions from destruction by a third (Erudite) by being divergent – rejecting received and rigid modes of behavior and thought. In “The Eleventh Plague,” in the post-apocalyptic aftermath of biological warfare with China, orphaned and distrustful teenager Stephen and his bad-seed Chinese-American girlfriend Jenny secure help from people that their town elders had thought were plotting their destruction. Ironically, in action-packed, plot-driven novels filled with violence, these novels interrogate the practice of using violence (and sometimes torture) as a solution to political and social problems.
Stories of people who are trampled on by competing ideologies and broken by enforced scarcity are certainly apt at a time when the U.S. political system is regularly brought to a standstill by politicians unwaveringly devoted to ideologies, the European Union threatens to disintegrate due to its members’ conflicting demands, divisions between the rich and the poor are ever-increasing, and those with the power to help offer rhetoric instead. The Occupy movement, as a loosely affiliated band of concerned people – Marxists, anarchists, environmentalists, survivalists, and more – has on the whole avoided ideology and embraced diversity and democracy. Some would say its lack of specific goals has undermined it, but the adoption of a V-style oppositional stance surely wouldn’t help. Occupy has done much to cast the U.S. and U.K. as dystopias, as pictures of police in riot gear confronting protestors have proliferated in the media; nonetheless, it needn’t cast itself as the kind of rebel movement that uses repressive strategies similar to those of the ruling elite.
Propped against a wall inside the Bank of Ideas is a placard that reads, “’1984′ was not supposed to be an instruction manual.” Nor, indeed, is “V for Vendetta,” and neither are “The Hunger Games” or “Chaos Walking.” The new YA dystopian novels are thoughtful books, but they don’t offer solutions or blueprints – they merely suggest ways of combating stifling political ideologies. They’re full of different voices, or what literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, writing in – and against – Soviet Russia, called “polyphony”: the opposite of propaganda, and the enemy of ideology. Where they resonate with the Occupy movement, it’s in the protagonists’ determination to recalibrate the world around us in creative ways: seeing a bank as an educational institution, a tent as a library, a movement as a gathering of people asking questions, and encouraging ways of thinking by which solutions could be found.
While you can’t – and perhaps shouldn’t – evict an idea, it’s best, as the U.K. singer Nicolette has said, and as these dystopias suggest, to let no one live rent-free in your head.
Unfortunately, the clip actually tells us nothing about the character we haven’t already seen, but hey, I could watch it 100 times and it will still be better than half of last season.
5. Safe-for-work “Star Wars” porn parody:
This looks amazing. Why is it funny? I thought “parody” was just another word for “We’re making this beloved show or movie into a porno.”
How they ever found a kid who looks that much like Mark Hamill is beyond me. Two tickets, please!
Is there a law on the Internet that says that for every original idea, someone has probably done a “Star Wars” parody of it? There should be. For a story that’s been around for over 30 years, the iconic characters of George Lucas’ films always find ways to appear in the most unlikely of places: in musicals, riding bikes, even in rap music.
Nicholas Hyde is one of the many devoted “Star War” fans who have updated the iconography of his childhood. A 32-year-old artist living in Oregon, Hyde’s prints give those famous “Star Wars” figures some modern street cred: Using crisp outlines and dark shadows, Hyde fashions portraits of Yoda playing at the turntables, or Boba Fett with an old-school jukebox. It’s like something Kevin Smith might have come up with if he made art instead of movies.
“The inspiration behind my art came mostly from old ’90s skateboard graphics,” Hyde tells me over email. “I loved how they were very iconic and simple, yet made a statement. Evan Hecox and Jim Phillips are some of my favorite artists. The ‘Star Wars’ characters came from the love of the whole story line of the movies when I was a kid. Still to this day, it’s epic.”
“I would describe my work as a mashup … a little bit hood adventure and a little bit space adventure. My first piece was OG1 Kenobi, I think I just watched ‘CB4‘ with Chris Rock and it just kind of clicked. My favorite piece is Darth Fader, though; just the thought of him in party mode and trying to control the galaxy is hilarious to me. “
When asked if he was worried that George Lucas might come after him for copyright infringement, Hyde replied, “I would hope that if my art ever gets in front of G.L., that he would get a laugh out of it. I sold a piece to Mark Zuckerberg’s sister, Arielle. She thought they were funny and that is kind of what I’m aiming for.”
You can purchase Hyde’s prints of “Star Wars” and other classic movie characters here, here or here.
(Credit: Shutterstock/Salon) 
(Credit: AP) 
A porn parody that's more parody than porn? 
