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."

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