Ernie Fosselius
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Ernie Fosselius (born 1945) is an American filmmaker, best known for his classic Star Wars parody Hardware Wars.
After performing with the San Francisco band Earth Mother and The Final Solution, Fosselius' film career began in the early 1970’s when he co-created 20 original animated films for Sesame Street.
Fosselius is known for his satirical short films. One of the most notable, made in 1976 for "Mother's Little Network", a Pythonesque sketch comedy show for WGBH in Boston, was The Hindenburger, in which a flying Big Mac burst into flames over New Jersey while a radio announcer (voiced by Fosselius) emotionally sobbed: "Oh the humanity!"
Fosselius' biggest hit was his 1978 parody Hardware Wars, a 12 minute parody of Hollywood coming attractions that took on the cultural juggernaut that was Star Wars. Complete with cardboard sets and visible wires holding up ships which were various household appliances. The film was shot over 4 days with a budget of around $7,000. When released, the film became a hit on its own, grossing close to one million dollars over its lifetime, making it one of the most popular and profitable short films of all time. In later years, George Lucas called it his favorite Star Wars parody, and Fosselius is credited with co-writing the song "Lapti Nek" in Return of the Jedi.
He followed Hardware Wars with Porklips Now, a sendup of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now which starred Billy Gray of TV's "Father Knows Best". After that film, Fosselius continued to work in the movie business as a director of "industrial " shorts, an actor, a screenwriter (11 unproduced scripts including the Zippy the Pinhead movie) sound effects and foley editor, voice actor, and special effects fabricator (Robocop, etc.), although he has largely stayed out of the public eye.
When Hardware Wars was re-released in 1997 with new special effects in a "Special Edition" to spoof the special editions of the original Star Wars trilogy, Fosselius was not involved, as he disagreed with the concept of adding actual digital effects to a film which satirized digital effects, and asked that a "Not Approved by Ernie" label be added to the release.
When the film was released on DVD in its original form in 2002, Fosselius did participate, restoring the original stereo soundtrack, adding additional material and original outtakes, and recording a director's commentary that itself was a parody, poking fun at similarly self-indulgent tracks. However, Fosselius was reportedly flummoxed by the technicians who performed the telecine transfer and made attempts to digitally remove the strings and wires and clean up the print, not realizing that the "defects" in the original were put there on purpose.
In 2003, Fosselius was honored by Lucasfilm when Hardware Wars was given the Pioneer Award at that year's Official Star Wars Fan Film Awards.
In recent years, Fosselius has retired from filmmaking and has taken to whittling mechanically animated carved caricatures and automata which he displays in traveling galleries called the "Marvelous Mechalodeon" and the "Crankabout Mechanical Theater", an entirely human powered exhibit. Several of these creations were used in a 2005 music video for The Heavenly States' song "Car Wash." Some photographs of these devices is in this flickr album.
[edit] Trivia
- Ben Burtt asked Fosselius to contibute unusual voices and vocal effects to several Lucasfilm productions, such as the two pilots in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and the sobs of the Ranchor Keepers in Star Wars: Episode VI Return of the Jedi. Also for that same film he contributed to the music score.
- He provided the voice of Poggle the Lesser in Star Wars: Episode II Attack of the Clones.
- He is also the voice of Trantor The Troll in Ernest Scared Stupid
- Fosselius was sound effects and foley editor on many films including Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Ed Wood
- Fosselius was a founding member of the band The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, and wrote the song "Hipsters on Parade".
