Mississippi Filmmakers Parody 'Star Wars'

JACKSON, Miss. – Yoda's tiny green hand is wrapped around a cold beer, not a lightsaber, as he listens to Mace Windu complain about being the only black Jedi.

It's a scene from "Star Wars Episode III: A Lost Hope," (search) a parody made by a group of filmmakers from McComb.

"The prequels have left themselves wide open to be lampooned," said Todd Bullock (search), who wrote, directed and starred in the six-minute film.

The parody has ignited buzz on the Internet and a flood of traffic to Bullock's Web site.

Doug Hammond, a producer with IFilm.com, said he noticed the film's popularity online and offered to host the trailer on the Web site for film shorts. The trailer has been viewed 65,000 times so far on IFilm.com, he said.

The trailer pokes fun at new and old "Star Wars" characters, including Jar Jar Binks, who's pummeled with shots from a dart gun throughout the trailer.

Bullock, 27, a Web site developer and part-time filmmaker, said he is not a big fan of the prequels. He was annoyed by Jake Lloyd (search), the child actor who portrayed Anakin Skywalker in "The Phantom Menace" — "it wasn't believable to me that that's the cat that is going to grow up to be Darth Vader" — and thought Hayden Christensen (search) was too whiny to be the future Vader.

Bullock portrays Anakin in the short film and said he tried to make the character as annoying as he appears on screen.

The trailer cost $1,000 to create, with about half used on computer software and a "green screen" for actors to stand in front of to create the backgrounds.

Bullock, who co-wrote the script with Eric Kohn, said it took three months to film the trailer at fellow actor Anthony Washington's studio in McComb.

In the trailer, Washington plays Mace Windu, the only black Jedi with a major role in recent films. Samuel L. Jackson plays Windu in the movies.

Washington, 23, a student at Southeastern Louisiana University, said he couldn't play the character as a "calm" and "get to business" kind of guy, so he opted to take the approach of being the only black on the Jedi Council.

Washington actually credits the "Star Wars" trilogy for bringing actors like Jackson and Billy Dee Williams to the science fiction screen — a place which he says has lacked diversity.

"In that sense, they were kind of taking leaps and bounds and incorporating that kind of idea of a very diverse universe," he said. "It would have to be. If our planet is, why wouldn't other planets have the same kind of diversity."