wo robots, a fussy humanoid and his squat beeping companion, both escape a fugitive starship under attack by representatives of an evil interstellar empire. Landing on a desert planet, they soon find themselves in the care of a callow farm youth whose dreams of off-world adventure are whetted by the discovery that the smaller of the two robots bears the holographic recording of an endangered princess who believes an old man named "Ben" to be her only hope.
Soon linking up with the wise old man, who gives the youngster a lightsaber once owned by the lad's father, the band of intrepid adventurers then find a space pilot who can smuggle them off the planet on a quest to rescue the princess and save the galaxy from the heavy-breathing, black-masked villain who has captured her.
Can good prevail? Or is too much to expect, for a steam iron to defeat a waffle iron in the darkness of interstellar space?
It will whisk you away—with a real whisk
Even as Star Wars and its spinoffs became a billion-dollar cultural phenomenon, this little poverty-row short carved its own niche in the cultural zeitgeist, a place which, though smaller, nevertheless seems to enjoy as much longevity.
It wasn't that the idea of parodying a hit movie was so new. Movie parodies are as old as the movies. But parodying a movie which was then a nationwide obsession, in a manner that mocked the real thing's big-budget pretensions by wallowing in its own low-budget limitations, was in its own way an act of genius: Certainly, the first shot of the steam iron, swinging across the screen on a string, in a manner that precisely echoed the flight of the Millennium Falcon, is still laugh-out-loud funny a quarter of a century later ... as is the heroine's protest that Basketball is a peaceful planet.
Given the parody's brief running time, it's easy to call the value of the DVD into question, but the producers have actually managed to provide a genuine treasure trove of extras. There's an amusing brand-new prologue, where the original film is "discovered" and appraised by the experts at the Antiques Roadshow; it's a deft and quite funny parody of that program, done with skill and self-deprecating wit. The director's commentary is the most rambling and desperate string of mumbled irrelevancies in the history of director's commentaries: a perfect parody of DVD director's commentaries by directors who genuinely have nothing of any value to say.
The "Director's Cut" replaces every shot in the film with prior takes that didn't work, including one where the credits are attacked by a playful cat. There's a contemporary interview with director Ernie Fosselius, from the TV show Creature Features, a witty Hollywood Gift Catalogue stuffed with odd merchandise for the mogul on the go, a disconcerting option to detonate the DVD, and more: oodles and oodles of stuff, more than most feature-length DVDs manage to provide. It's these extras which make the Hardware Wars DVD an oddity worth owning.
