Inspired like most by their action figures, Timothy Edward Smith and Hunter Russell Nolen turned the quintessential space opera into literally a musical extravaganza.  The two wrote and recorded the Star Wars Musical during the mid-90s (MP3s available), winning an Atom Films Fan Award for their animated adaptation of Luke’s “One Season More”. Come back for part 2 of the interview.

Prodigeek: What inspired you to write Star Wars Musical?

Tim: We’re big fans of the movie and we that was a big part of growing up for us. For me, I was a big fan of movie soundtracks. Later in high school I got into theatrical musicals so that kind of combination of things was kind of my background. As far as doing Star Wars, it really just started as a joke cause it sounded like a really ridiculous idea. And so we were just kind of joking around with each other and you know thought of some of the song ideas and just how silly they were. So that was kind of in the back of our minds for a while. Then eventually a few years after that we actually started creating it.

Hunter: We were joking around one night. We were playing with stupid little old star wars figures one night and we acted like they were singing cause we were nerdy enough to do that. We came up with these dumb little songs. Some of those songs ended up in the actual musical years later. A lot of new ones of course.

Prodigeek: Was the playing with the figures you did regularly

Tim: [Laughing] Not at that time. I think it was something where we pulled them out and were like oh remember these and just started goofing around.

Prodigeek: How long know each other

Tim: Since high school, over 20 years.

Hunter: Since Junior High when I was in 9^th grade band and Tim would always come in late to rehearsal because his mom would just not get him there in time. I was like that jerk he’s always late. That’s when I first saw Tim.

Tim: I wasn’t friends with him until high school a couple of years later. But yeah, over 20 years.

Prodigeek: How did you start working together?

Hunter: We’ve done stupid little movies since high school. Nowadays kids have these digital camcorders and like everybody makes movies. That wasn’t the case in 1986 and 1987 when we were doing this we were making these stupid movies. I think of myself more as an independent filmmaker now. Tim has actually composed music for some movies.

Prodigeek: When did you start working on Star Wars Musical?

Tim: I think we got the idea like in 1990 but I didn’t actually start writing it until ’95. We wrote it and recorded it in a 2 years.

Hunter: I’m a classical musical and I was able to get a lot of my friends to play on it for free. We would take Tim’s digital recorder to these people’s houses and record this poor trombone player doing 3 trombone parts. That’s insane. You don’t record a piece that way. We just sewed together a fake digital orchestra and half the orchestra is real instruments and other parts are synthesized.

Prodigeek: Both of you have musical background?

Tim: Yeah Hunter’s much more trained than I am. I’m kind of self taught more.

Hunter: We were both in high school band. I went on to get a degree in music. Tim just did his own thing. But who cares if you have a degree or not. It’s all about having fun with it.

Prodigeek: You did a lot of the singing?

Tim: We pulled in pretty much everyone we know. We sang multiple parts. We have no voice training at all. We pulled in everyone we knew who could stay on pitch to perform.

Prodigeek: How did the project evolve in to such a production?

Tim: We have a history of doing these fun little projects. What starts out as one little thing can easily grow into a bigger thing. We created it in kind of a layered way. You write it and then it’s like, okay we wrote some funny songs. Then let’s record it. We recorded a lot cause we wanted to get really good performances. And then let’s get real people to play instruments on it. So it just kept growing over the years.

Hunter: It was all going to be Tim’s synthesized orchestra. Tim had a good keyboard that could reproduce synthesized sounds. Then I’m like, well I play clarinet, I’ll play clarinet on it. I’ll bring in a coupe of more people. And that kind of exploded into, now it sounds like halfway a real orchestra, this thing’s getting out of hand. We just went with it.

Tim: We also recorded all the singing. No one actually sang together. Everything was pieced together. We would go where we needed to go and record, even if they only sang one line. We’d go there, record their one line, take off, go somewhere else, and pieced it together that way.

Hunter: [Chuck Mabrey who played] Han Solo, he sings in this country folk band. He doesn’t get this musical style. We’re trying to make some musical, hyper dramatic kind of feeling. The whole thing’s a joke. Star Wars the Musical would be horrible if you ever saw it acted out. Getting this guy to do this musical thing was just impossible so for him we had to do it literally one line at a time. I remember directing him. I go okay, you’re really cold. You’re in the Arctic and you’re just really cold. And that was the only way we could get that real hyper dramatic feel we wanted. He was trying to do it too good. We’re like no no make it more campy fun.

Prodigeek: Any songs end up on the cutting room floor?

Tim: No. There were a couple of false starts that became other songs. I started to write a song for the scene when Luke first sees Princess Leia through the R2-D2 hologram thing. I started to write that scene and that song but eventually I moved that into the Obi-Wan song.

Prodigeek: How did you pick which scenes to adapt?

Hunter: The original joke was only the moments in the movie that should not be a song will be a song. We departed from that pretty quickly. Like “Do you speak Bocce” that shouldn’t be a song. Why should Uncle Owen even be in it. We just think that’s funny. But we left that pretty quickly.

Tim: As we started to lay it out, I was like we’ve got a lot of holes, like what about the whole second half of the movie. What do you do with that. Those songs more strictly follow the story. The characters don’t deviate much from what they really are. The ones we originally came up with are more silly like C-3PO is a tough guy and totally the opposite of what he is in the movie.

Prodigeek: What are your musical influences?

Tim: [Phantom of the Opera and Les Misérables] were the main ones. In that period those were my main influences so. Even the whole idea of making an album was like if you were to buy the Les Misérables CD back then it’s not the whole show. There’s only most of the songs. So we purposely left out parts of the story to make it appear more like a real Broadway album. Like oh they didn’t have all the songs, it skips around a bit. So it’s a real goof on musical album.

The CD was going to be a big deal. Everybody back then didn’t make CDs left and right. It was a big deal if you could make CDs on your computer. So like we’ll make a label and we’ll say original cast recording. All these little fake touches. We had a little booklet of lyrics that went along with fake pictures we made. It’s pretty nerdy because it’s like who’s this for. This isn’t for anybody.

Hunter: Not even everybody got it. Like 6 people got it out of everybody that was part of it. There was a duel version that have the karaoke tracks. Then one day I go we should put this on the internet. If there’s at all a forum where people are inherently geeky and will appreciate this, it’s the internet. So I was like dude, we have to get this on the internet. Our first site was so bad.

Be sure to return tomorrow for more Star Wars Musical interviewing.