In 1996 three high school students were on a mission to bring the movie Star Wars to life on the stage as a musical. They took music from such Broadway hits as Grease and Les Miserables, rewrote the lyrics and presented the concoction as a 40 member rock opera, much in the same vein as Jesus Christ: Superstar and Godspell. The show was a huge hit, but only was seen for three nights before it was shut down by George Lucas with a court order. Mainly because the show was making money and even these days, Lucas doesn’t like that, even though he’s been more tolerant of fan based movies and creations based on the Star Wars universe.
The two videos that have been made available from the show are The Millenium Falcon (a send up of Grease’s Greased Lightning) and Use the Force (sung to the tune of Les Miserables’ One Day More). There is talk of releasing the whole video to the show, but its unclear when that would happen or whether it can, given Lucas’ hold on it. We hope they can get it worked out with the legal eagles, although probably the financial side will be the deciding point we think. If it’s just released on YouTube or something, that might fly, but if they are selling it on iTunes, maybe not. We do hope that the video that is complete has better sound. Of course, video technology isn’t what it was then, but the audio is really hard to hear at points.
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And in another version of a musical adaptation of Star Wars is one with all original music and lyrics that was completed in 1999. This one is more like a concept album in the same type as Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds, although not nearly as polished. But then they probably didn’t have the resources that Jeff Wayne did. But to complete an entire rework of the movie, writing all the lyrics and music is impressive indeed. You can learn more about this project at http://www.infauxmedia.com/. Someone then took that music and edited the movie into it, making for a very interesting version of A New Hope indeed. You can see those on YouTube starting here…
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And then there is one playing on YouTube that doesn’t really match either one. The only thing we know about it is that it was performed by the TCNJ Musical Theatre on March 27-30, 2008. And we know it’s hilarious. Star Wars: The Musical (A Musical Parody) takes several scenes from the movies and turns them into comedy gold. For instance, the scene where Darth Vader is choking the Admiral for speaking out of turn. Unlike in the movie, where Tarkin orders Vader to let him go, Vader continues to go on, pulling him this way and that way with every move of his hand, until he’s dead, for which he then promotes the next person when he finds he’s killed the guy by accident. And a Blown Up World (a spoof of Aladdin’s Whole New World) goofs through the story of Tarkin telling Leia he’s going to blow up Alderaan. Unfortunately only a few parts are actually on YouTube, but what we’ve seen of it, we hope they can put up the whole thing at some point. You can see all there is here
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And so there is a lot of musical ideas out there in relation to Star Wars. We would love to see any of them be made into a real film if Lucas would allow it, especially the last one. It could be as popular as Spaceballs we think. But alas, Lucas is careful about his creation so who knows. Cheers to those who have created all of these though.
