Edward Smith and Hunter Russell Nolen continue telling Prodigeek about their hilarious Star Wars Musical.  You can read part 1 here.

Prodigeek: How was the initial reaction on the web?

Hunter: We slowly started getting an email here and there. We had these fake write ups about us. We didn’t want to say who we were because we thought George Lucas would get mad or something. For a long time we were just anonymous. But the first time I got an email from Sweden, I was like hey that’s cool, people all over the world like this.

Tim: How often do you get emails?

Hunter: They seem to come in waves. Like I’ll get nothing for months and then I’ll get 3 and an interesting phenomenon in the last year is we’ve gotten some hate mail saying “You all are fags, this is stupid”. And that just started. [laughing]. There’s only been a few of those the whole time. Unfortunately those stand out. It’s like you took the time to write this.

Tim: Another interesting thing is on YouTube, someone took our making of video and put that up. So there’s a video about us that I didn’t put up. That’s weird, who put that up and why.

Prodigeek: When did you make your Making of Video?

Tim: [The One Season More song] was the big part of the video and also the website. After I did that animation I wanted to completely revamp the website and make this really cool. So that was 2005 we made the making of video, the animation [of One Season More], revamped the website.

Prodigeek: What brought about creating the animated version of One Season More?

Tim: We wanted to do a computer video. We wanted to do an easy song with maybe one person. One Season More is a good song to use because there’s one person, but the song wasn’t good enough so we re-wrote the song and made it hopefully better.

I’m into a lot of artistic things and 3D animation is something I dabble in. I hadn’t done a big animation project so I wanted to pick something to do. I thought let’s pick one of the Star Wars Musical songs. Hunter said what song. Let’s rewrite one of them and make it really good, lots more height, quality.

Prodigeek: And it one fan film award?

Tim: Yeah, the Atom Films Star Wars Fan Film Award. Won the best song award.

Hunter: Which as far as I know that’s the only time they’ve awarded a best song.

Tim: We didn’t get the big George Lucas Select Award. Just knowing he saw it is kind of cool.

Prodigeek: Ever heard been in contact with George Lucas?

Tim: For a short period after that we tried to get into touch with Lucas Films and get some information like if could we really get this musical performed. But we just didn’t follow through with it. And they didn’t really get back to us too much. So it just kind of fizzled out.

Hunter: The main reason for that is some schools emailed that want to put it on. It seems popular with schools to do something with this material. I wanted to get some clearance from Lucas Films so these schools can do this. But they just wouldn’t respond. But these schools have still done it, and I hope that since its used for educational purposes they will always allow that to happen.

Tim: It’s been performed by a couple different high schools. Some person wrote us recently and this was weird. They wanted to use the music but not the lyrics. They just wanted to just go off and do their own musical.

Hunter: He was from, I think, the Netherlands. He said I want to use your music, but my lyrics and my story, it’s not Star Wars. Well there’s Star Wars themes woven throughout, but sure, whatever you want.

Prodigeek: Have you seen any of the school productions?

Hunter: Somebody sent us a video of one that they did.

Tim: I found another one on YouTube. These people never contacted me. I don’t know who these people are. I just see another performance of it on YouTube. I’ve seen a couple things like one person doing what we did using the Star Wars figures with our songs to it.

Hunter: The other day I was bored at work and I’m on YouTube and I find somehow this old thing of the Star Wars Christmas Special that came on in the 70s and I found this thing that Princess Leia sings. So of course I have to click on that. And sure enough she sings in that. I never knew that. I saw that when it was on TV when I was little but I don’t remember it. Sure enough she freakin’ sings and it’s really Carrie Fisher and she really sings. I sent Tim that link and we talked about it that night and he’s like, I wonder if in the back of my mind that’s where the whole idea for this came from subconsciously. But yeah everybody check that, it’s amazing that she actually sings in it.

Prodigeek: Any more animations planned?

Tim: Not at the moment. I have ideas but it’s so much work. I’d like to do them but yeah.

Hunter: [Tim] worked pretty much full time on that by himself for 18 months for One Season More so I can certainly understand.

Tim: It’s really nice once you have the finished project but to get there is just a tremendous amount of work. I’m no expert at all at animation or any facet of it so I’m learning it as I’m doing it and that’s what you’re seeing.

Hunter: Tim would calmly just go ugh, this plug-in, I don’t know why it’s doing what it’s doing. It comes with no documentation. I can’t look up why its doing it. So if you watch the One Season More video, watch Luke’s tunic. It’s like waving like its an ocean floor. Why’s it doing that. Tim could never figure out why it was doing that and get it to stop.

Tim: When I started making the video there was no deadline or time crunch in which to get it done. Just for fun. And then we heard about the fan films and we were like, let’s try to get it in that. And then suddenly it was like man now we have no time to finish this thing. The one that won the award is not a complete version of the video which we now have on our website. It was just half the length.

Prodigeek: Have you made any other musical works?

Hunter: Funny you should ask.

Tim: When we finished [Star Wars in] 1999, the next year we wrote another musical called Beyond the Gates which is obviously nothing to do with Star Wars or nothing to do with any other movie spoofs. It was just a new original musical that we wrote for a theater festival in Dallas, Teasx.

Hunter: This theatrical producer I knew, I’d given him the CD and he’s like, I love Star Wars the Musical. I’m in this theater festival and I don’t have a show. Do you guys want to write a musical, and we’re like sure. So that just led to that.

Prodigeek: What was it about?

Hunter: We talked years ago before Star Wars about doing an Oedipus Rex musical because Tim had directed Oedipus Rex in high school and we were like that would make a good musical. So we wanted to do a musical of that. We changed it, based it very loosely on the Oedipus Rex story and set it in this weird sci-fi kind of environment.

Prodigeek: How was the performance?

Tim: It was another issue of having a time crunch where we only had six months. It was only an hour long slot for a show, but the show we came up with is really should be 2 hours so we had to condense it, really compress it and make it run fast. So we only had 6 months to write it and put it up. That was in 2000.

Hunter: Which is insane. A lot of aspects of it we weren’t happy with. We got some very nice write ups in the paper. We had one review that I would call honest. The rest were just too, you know, too praising.

Prodigeek: What do for work?

Tim: I create sound libraries which are that programs people can that write music and do music on computers can use.

Hunter: Yeah he’s had some reviews of his stuff in Electronic Music Magazine and some other places. And I work in the IT industry for my day job. I think of myself as an independent filmmaker and I wish I was doing a whole lot more with that than I am lately.

Prodigeek: Have you seen any of the productions?

Tim: The one I saw was only like a 30 minute version. The thing is close to an hour. [The school] did a 30 minute, they just did excerpts.

Hunter: What they did was pretty good. The drama teacher that contacted me he said I’m going to have to add some sort of narrator to string these numbers together, do you have any pointers. I was like no, we know that’s a problem. He did it really well. His concept was a group of kids in the garage playing Star Wars. This one guy, I think the Obi-Wan character, he’ll just narrate, “now our team is in the Death Star and they bla bla bla. And they just launch into the song. People are always emailing us asking us for a script or for sheet music or for the orchestra parts. There never was any. No one who ever sang on it looked at any music for it.

Tim: Most of the people weren’t musicals who had no voice training so we just, I recorded it myself. I sang all the parts and gave that to everyone else to learn off of. So the parts that are harmonies you know like well this is your part, then I had recorded it previously myself and had given everyone their own part so they could learn it.

Hunter: One thing I’ve always wanted to do is replace all the songs up there with the version Tim did. Tim singing every part, especially him singing the Princess Leia part. It’s just hilarious.

Your can read part 1 of the Star Wars Musical interview here.

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.

What do Bye Bye Birdie, Annie, and Superman all have in common? The same guy wrote music for all of their Broadway features. Yes, Superman flew onto and was quickly thrown off Broadway in a 1966 smash musical that lasted a dismal 129 shows. For the macho geekery, the knowledge of a Superman musical can be disturbing, shocking, and morbidly fascinating (the CD is available). Proving the musical’s greatness, the Lex Luthor-like villain Max Mercury sings to Lois Lane:

You know, you’re really quite a dish.
You’re what a guy might call delish.
You’ve got an awful lot of class.
You’re packed as solid as a knish.

Check your local summer stock theaters, lyrics like this are still popular in some circles. Or see if you can track down the made-for-TV movie version.

Now the second of Geek Musical Week on Prodigeek, I continue my interview with Buffy creator Joss Whedon about his upcoming internet, musical, superhero series, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, appearing next week beginning on July 15th on their official site. Read Part 1 of our Joss Whedon interview here.

Prodigeek - How did you kind of come to this idea of an internet musical about a superhero?

Whedon - I had come up with the concept and the title originally as an audio podcast. I wanted to write a song. I was tired of not writing songs and I wanted a structure to write from. And I though this guy would have a blog and sing about what’s going on with him. It would be a fun thing to do. Then, during the strike, when everyone was looking to create internet content, I thought of it as a limited series. Then when I decided to do it myself, I thought of it as an even more limited series. It played itself out pretty simply. I brought writers in; we knew from the start exactly what we wanted to do. I had written the songs for it a while ago. The first song was called “My Freeze Ray.” I played that for the other writers. We got sort of an idea of sound, and then we started breaking a story. We broke it into three acts, a mini-series event, and then hopefully to make it a downloadable commodity. In addition to creating something out of love of musicals and love of the fans, I also wanted to create something where we could make money doing our own thing, outside the system. I also want to, in a perfect dream world, pay my crew.

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To kick off Geek Musical Week, Prodigeek speaks to Joss Whedon about his upcoming internet, musical, superhero series, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog coming to a website near you next week. The creator of Buffy and the Buffy musical episode, “Once More, With Feeling,” Whedon already has a classic Geek Musical under his belt as he tackles the world of new media and internet distribution, something you surely need superpowers to tame.  Check out part 2 of our Whedon interview here.

Prodigeek - Tell me about Dr. Horrible.

Joss Whedon - Well, I can tell you it’s the story of Dr. Horrible, a low-rent super villain trying to make his way in the world, being evil, defeat his nemesis, Captain Hammer, who beats him up on a weekly basis, and work up the courage to talk to the prettiest girl walking around. It basically follows his travails. It’s about 40 minutes, in three acts, and was designed to be just your typical internet, superhero musical.

Prodigeek - What defines the typical internet, superhero musical?

Whedon - I don’t know, I’ve never seen one. It’s supposed to define the typical superhero musical, by being the first one. We’re getting it out before Spider-Man on Broadway. By the way, they are doing Spider-Man on Broadway, you know that, right?

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Superheroes, demons, and plants are not your standard musical subject matter, but for the unique genre of Geek Musicals, they are the C# to our A major chord.  Musicals dwell in a world of fantasy and disbelief that geeks are well versed in making the genres oddly compatible yet rarely recognized.  Here I highlight the 7 best geek musicals, judged on their subject matter, entertainment value, and quality of songs.  Only musicals with released performances, either on stage or film, were considered.  Each musical includes a musical video, so prepare to hum, laugh, and cry through the list of the Best Geek Musicals here at Geek Musical Week on Prodigeek.

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This week, Prodigeek celebrates Geek Musicals, from Broadway to the internet to commercial to fan creations.  I’ve got interviews with Joss Whedon about his upcoming internet, musical series, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, Jon & Al Kaplan, the creators of Silence: The Musical (based on Silence of the Lambs) and 24: Season 2: The Musical, and Timothy Smith and Hunter Nolen, the creators of the Star Wars Musical.  So keep checking Prodigeek this week for your Geek Musical fix, even if you didn’t know you needed one.

Next Prodigeek is celebrating Geek Musicals with special articles and interviews, praising the geekiest of geek genres.  From Superman crashing on Broadway to South Park on the big screen to the fan created Star Wars musical, true geeks know nothing makes fantasy and science fiction better than song and dance.

So come back next week for musical fun.