Well, here’s the start of the series of post I mentioned last week regarding my take on Fan Films, and maybe some explanation of led me to write “Fan Film The Series” in the first place.
Let’s start with the one that started this whole mess. The mess meaning the ever growing monster called “fan films”.
Regardless of popular opinion, I don’t consider “Troops” to be that “one.” Don’t get me wrong – Troops is incredible, and probably single handedly ignited the explosion of fan films that exist today. But before Troops, there was another.
I present for your consideration as “the one that started it all”:
Hardware Wars
Where are currently in the 30th Anniversary of the release of Star Wars and fan films are still just beginning on paper, “Hardware Wars” was released 7 months after Star Wars!
It was written and directed by Ernie Fosselius, and produced by Ernie Fosselius and Michael Wiese.
The parody character names include:
Chewchilla the Wookie Monster
Ham Salad
Darph Nader
Fluke Starbucker
Augie Ben Doggie
Princess Anne-Droid
4Q2
Arty Deco
George Lucas has been quoted as saying “Hardware Wars is my favorite Star Wars parody.”
Which pretty much explains what’s happened to Star Wars since 1999.
I don’t know what else to say about this one. Other than – it’s the first.
So instead of trying to explain it, let’s just take a look:
As we wait for the final filming in Orlando, the final editing of the PA footage, and the final rendering of the post production effects, I was planning to take this time to start a short series of posts regarding Fan Films in general since those are what pretty much inspired me to create this series in the first place.
So, not that the preface is set up, let me change gears and tell a whole other story, though related, that leads to this post.
I was searching youtube.com looking for footage of the fan films I was planning to write about. While watching the trailer for what I consider to be my personal favorite fan film (to be revealed in a post later) the youtube “related videos” column listed something interesting.
“Boba Fett Vs. Predator”.
Okay, I could hear the collective “guish” of everyone rolling their eyes, but hear me out.
The Boba Fett costume looks great, the Predator – well, not so much. But it’s a difficult costume, and considering the typical fan film budget, it’s pretty damn impressive.
However, that’s not what intrigued me about this idea. More, it was the feasibility of the story it’s self.
Consider this – there’s never been, at least to my knowledge, a pin-point location named for the Predator’s home world. In fact, I theorized the Predators were most likely nomads until that steaming pile of celluloid “AVP-R” came out and it gave us a glimpse of the Predator home world. Regardless, the location of said planet was not disclosed. So it could easily be in our galaxy, or in a galaxy far, far away. Even more likely, somewhere in between.
Okay, so the question of location is out of the way. “But what about ‘A long time ago’” you may ask.
Ah, let me give you my take on that. We’ll just throw out the idea that the events of Star Wars happen really, really, long ago. Like, millions of years ago. So long that we couldn’t possibly benchmark those events with anything in the regards to the history of the earth that we know about.
So, Predator history. First, in AVP (the first, less steaming one) the premise of the whole film starts with the discovery of a Mayan / Incan / Aztec hybrid temple that was constructed tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years ago. As we learn, this temple is a hunting/training ground for Predators. Good start. So, that doesn’t make up for the each few million years yet. Ah, but one thing to help support that idea is the shoulder canons. The shoulder cans are stored in the temple. They may have been sitting there for thousands of years, yet they are pretty dang technologically advanced which demonstrates a very, very long time of technological evolution.
Now, the further point could be made that “Hey, for all we know, some Predator lackey put those canons in the temple the day before the hunt.”
My response is, though less compelling, “No one knows how old the Predators are so it’s entirely possibly they existed a long time ago, so nah!”.
At this point of the post, I realize my original intention was to just embed this youtube video and say, “Hey ya’ll check this out”. So, here it is:
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