Hardware Wars

The war over film vs. video was anticlimactic at best; a couple of months of debate and by 2010 celluloid was in the rear-view mirror with only a few heavyweights like Spielberg and Tarantino insisting their work be captured chemically rather than digitally.  And, to be honest, not much has been lost.  Speaking as the last generation of film schoolers to cut their own negative, the process flat-out sucked and essentially served as a technical gatekeeper to discourage the masses.  Even parodies and memes, tossed together today during a bathroom break, were an $8,000 labor of love.  Take Hardware Wars (1978) for example, a 13-minute spoof that road the coattails of the era’s biggest cinematic phenomenon.

Essentially an extended trailer that takes potshots at what had already become mainstream iconography, writer-director Enrnie Fosselius’ film actually goes pretty easy on George Lucas’ space opera.  Fluke Starbucker and Augie “Ben” Doggie team up with Ham Salad and Chewchilla (a dead-ringer for Cookie Monster) to destroy the empire and save Princess Ann-Droid from Darph Nader.  It’s certainly not ROTFLmaterial:  toasters replace tie fighters, a basketball stands-in for Alderaan, no one can understand a single word coming out of Darph Nader’s voice modulator.  But it had that handmade ingenuity – and perfect pop culture timing – that turned it into a short-lived phenomenon all its own.

 

For a follow-up, Fosseslius took on Apocalypse Now, an easier target with its suggestions of pretensions, big name stars and egotistical director.  Porklips Now (1980) covers all those bases and then some as Dullard is hired by a meat consortium to travel to Chinatown and confront Fred “Madman” Mertz whose prices have become “unsound.”  Replacing surfboards with skateboards and helicopters with motorcycles, Fosseslius lovingly rakes Coppola’s war movie over the coals, having a particularly good time with Dullard’s monotone voiceover narration (“He was close.   Boy, was he close now.  Way closer than earlier.”)  

 

Both of these shorts have been floating around the internet for a while now, but MVD presents a brand-new 2K transfer of Hardware Wars from the only surviving element, in a perfect slipcover reproduction of the old Warner Brothers VHS clamshell packaging. Porklips Now is included too, along with a Plan 9 From Outer Space puppetoon spoof and several variations on Hardware Wars: a Christmas special, foreign version and director’s cut.  Another bonus? Fosselius’ appearance on a local Creature Feature where he hawks (as a gag) Hardware Wars swag, admitting they made the film just for the merchandising.  That one might hit a little tooclose to home even for Star Wars fans to admit.  Either way, may the farce be with you.

 

 

 

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