Any fan of Star Wars can tell you one of the best parts about loving Star Wars is getting to make fun of Star Wars. From the stilted dialogue to the made-up space words, the things that make Star Wars so great are also the things that people love to poke fun at.
And nobody is better at making fun of Star Wars than the fans that love it the most — people who take the time to put together a full-blown parody of Star Wars are usually some of the franchise’s biggest fans. These are the 10 best parodies of Star Wars throughout the years.
1. Hardware Wars
This is the granddaddy of all Star Wars parodies. Released in 1978, only 18 months after the release of A New Hope, this is considered to be the first widely successful parody of the Star Wars franchise. Portrayed as a trailer for the next big blockbuster hit, Hardware Wars retells the story of A New Hope with household appliances standing in for most of the spaceships, including a tape recorder, an iron, and a toaster all in an epic space battle.
The short’s deliberate low-budget look and feel, with most of the strings visible at all times and the lightsabers being nothing more than flashlights, set a tone for low-budget parody movies for years to come. The legacy of this movie is almost as lasting as that of Star Wars itself, with a special edition of Hardware Wars being released in the 1990s to parody the special edition releases of the original trilogy, and Rian Johnson even sneaking a Hardware Wars reference into The Last Jedi. At one point in the film, a threatening spaceship appears to be landing only for it to be revealed that the spaceship is actually an iron. Composer John Williams reportedly enjoyed getting to create such a dramatic musical cue for a uniform being ironed.