Bill Hader Channels His Inner Tauntaun

For "Saturday Night Live" cast member, comedian and actor Bill Hader, seeing Star Wars at a young age left a strong impression on him -- removing a few baby teeth in the process. "The first movie I remember seeing in a theater was The Empire Strikes Back with my dad," Hader recalls. "And when the movie got to the part with the tauntaun dying and he's cut open and I saw all that rice-like innards, I freaked out. I was probably about 3 years old and that scene scared the crap out of me. But my earliest childhood memories are mostly about collecting the Star Wars toys. In fact, I knocked my first tooth out running around with my Millennium Falcon and I hit a wall by accident. I was doing about six parsecs to warm up for the Kessel Run."

When he wasn't slamming into walls, the young Hader had fun reenacting his favorite scenes with Star Wars impressions and showing off his impressive toy collection. "I remember being Darth Vader for Halloween when I was a kid," Hader says. "I had the supermarket costume with the plastic mask and cape. I also had the Rancor monster which I brought to Show and Tell at school. I also had the small lightsaber that when you push the button it lights up, way before the other plastic lightsabers that made noise came out. So I had to bring that to Show and Tell as well. Sadly, my mom sold everything in a garage sale when I was 13 thinking I was too old for them. I remember specifically wanting to show a friend my Star Wars toys that I had been bragging to him about at school and they were gone. I was pretty shocked that she didn't wait until I at least left home first."

Hanging out at the local movie theater to see Star Wars films began at an early age. "My birthday is in early June, and since the movies always came out around late May, my birthdays sometimes had a Star Wars theme to them," Hader explains. "For my fifth birthday party, Return of the Jedi came out so all my friends and I went to go see it in the theater. All the users and concessions people were dressed up like stormtroopers and it was awesome."

Later on in high school, Hader took his then girlfriend to see one of his favorites in the saga -- The Empire Strikes Back -- with mixed results. "I went with a bunch of my friends to see a midnight screening The Empire Strikes Back Special Edition," Hader recalls. "Fans were dressed up in costumes and everyone was excited to see the film. I brought this girl I had started dating with us since she said she'd never seen a Star Wars film before. I filled her in on the storyline from A New Hope and said she should just enjoy watching it and not get too caught up in the plot. So as the movie starts in Hoth, and as the characters show up onscreen, she turns to me and gasps loudly, 'Hey! I didn't know Harrison Ford was in this!' And it got super quiet and some guy in the back of the theater then said, 'Who the hell just said that?' And then everybody in the theater groaned and starting booing my date. Obviously, we're not dating anymore."

Fast forward to college, and Hader was back in line to see the prequels. "When I was going to college in Phoenix, my friends and I took turns waiting in a line at the mall to see The Phantom Menace," Hader says. "One friend would be there at 6 in the morning; then I took over at noon. People kept asking us what we were in line for, and we thought it was so obvious since there was a dude dressed as Yoda behind me. But for a laugh we bought this cheap Backstreet Boys poster and made a sign saying 'In line for Backstreet Boys' and told all these kids we were so excited to see them play."

While in college in Arizona, Hader met his longtime friend and budding sound designer Jacob Riehle. The two would later take their love for movies and create a parody called "Sounds Good to Me: Remastering The Sting," which was influenced by Lucasfilm documentaries. At the end of the parody, we see Hader as the delusional sound designer Barnaby G. Price on a payphone outside a convenience store pretending to be calling from Skywalker Sound, while looking out his window at Ewok Lake.

"My friend Jake Riehle actually has Ewok Lake as part of his email address," Hader says. "He and I went to a junior college in Arizona together and you felt like everyone was there until they could get accepted into USC, but none of us had the money or the grades. But Jake was the only guy there who seemed really serious about a career in film, and you got the feeling he would really make it as a sound designer. And because we all had read that George Lucas had started out in a junior college, we thought there was hope for us."

"The Ewok Lake mention was an inside reference on Ben Burtt," Hader admits. "Jake and Nick (Director Nicholas Jasenovec) had seen Burtt's sound design documentary for the Indiana Jones DVDs -- 'The Sound of Indiana Jones' -- and got the idea to do one on The Sting. But I had seen the sound doc 'Films Are Not Released: They Escape' on the Attack of the Clones DVD and was influenced by that as well."