The Usual Gang of Jediots: MAD About Star Wars

By Pablo Hidalgo

Tell me what it is you do at MAD Magazine.

I'm a Senior Editor here at MAD Magazine. My primary responsibility is recruiting new cartoonists, and then trying to make them funnier. It's a lot of going out into the world and looking at new cartoonists' work or finding it online and calling them up and saying, "Hey, do you want to work for MAD?" I work with them to develop new characters for the magazine.

And I also do a fair amount of -- if we're trying to set up a deal with third-party publisher, pitching them MAD ideas, MAD books, and for other media as well.

Before that, you worked for Lucasfilm. How long did you do that?

I worked for Lucasfilm a little bit before MAD. Here's the chronology: I first interned for MAD in college in '93, and then I interned for Marvel Comics and Valiant Comics, interned for "Late Show with David Letterman," all during that summer and year. And then in the summer of '94, I interned for Lucasfilm, and they basically kept me for about six years or so. I came back the next summer, the summer of '95, to work for Lucasfilm again. I had initially interned on The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles and Radioland Murders, and in the summer of '95, I was a postproduction assistant on the Young Indy show.

Also in the summer of '95, preproduction on Episode I was gearing up. So even though I had to go back to school, I transitioned into working as a conceptual researcher for Episode I, and I continued to work for Episode I from my dorm room. Once I graduated college, I came back to Skywalker Ranch and worked there from '96 till about the end of '99.

Could you describe some of the strange things you did at Lucasfilm?

What was particularly fun and strange was the way Episode I was made. George, I guess calls it -- if I remember it correctly -- three-dimensional filmmaking, in that he'll be working on preproduction, production and postproduction all simultaneously, and largely this is because of his digital capabilities.

George is known for the detail he puts into creating his universe. For example, his creature designers have a background in zoology, like Terryl Whitlatch. His vehicle designers have a background in automotive design, like Jay Shuster or Doug Chiang. So to help those guys, he has a research team. So I worked on that research team, and whenever we weren't able to find something in the real world to help in terms of providing research, Ben Burtt would grab a camcorder and we would go and film a particular scene for the art department to study, or the actors to ultimately study, or so forth.

So what that meant was -- and this is probably one of the strangest things I did -- Ben Burtt had me as a proto-Jar Jar Binks. He came one Friday afternoon and he said to me and Koichi Kurisu, who was my fellow conceptual researcher in the office, and he said "Okay, Monday we're gonna film a little animatic/videomatic. It's going to be a scene where the strapping Jedi Knight and the awkward lanky alien are fleeing the battle tanks. Now, I don't think I need to tell you who's going to be awkward lanky alien." So he said, "Jon, this weekend, well, the Art Department's already made a Jar Jar mask for you. If you could maybe find an orange unitard to wear on Monday, that'd be great."

That weekend, Ellen Moon Lee, who is an artist in the Art Department and a friend of mine, we went around to various dance shops in the Bay Area trying to find orange unitards for a man. This went on all day with no luck. What we did instead was cobble together a costume from an orange sweat-suit. Come Monday morning, me and Koichi were told to run the hills of Skywalker Ranch, acting out scenes that would later be done by Ahmed Best and Liam Neeson and also the digital artists at ILM would also enhance Ahmed's performance, digitizing it into Jar Jar Binks.

We're not really actors, so in order to get the performance of true fear of being chased by a battle tank that Ben Burtt wanted, Ben decided at one point to get into a pickup truck and chase us. What was so particularly scary about that was, even though we didn't think he intended to run us over, Ben was so keen on getting the shot, he really wasn't watching as he drove, he really was leaning out the window of the driver's side door, looking through a camcorder, and pressing down on the gas pedal in the general direction of us.

So we spent a lot of time dodging the pickup truck and also -- there were scenes where we have to dive as if we're being run over by the battle tank. George has this herd of cattle up in the hills of Skywalker Ranch that tend to leave lots of fecal matter in, so there we were diving through cow poodoo, as it were, to help George get the shot. So, that was one of the stranger things I did for Lucasfilm.

How did your time at Lucasfilm prepare you for your time at MAD?

After I finished up at Lucasfilm, I did a few other things for a couple of years before ultimately returning to MAD Magazine, this time as a senior editor. What was great about returning as a senior editor this time is that I didn't have to go through any initiation tasks. As an intern, they made me glue things to myself until I was too heavy to move.

But in terms of the way Star Wars prepared me for MAD, they actually have a lot of common sensibilities. George is a big MAD fan, and grew up reading MAD. When George had to do the American Graffiti poster, the only guy he wanted to do it was Mort Drucker, the veteran caricaturist for MAD. But also theILM guys have a MAD sensibility. If you look at the MAD parodies, cartoonists like Mort Drucker or Hermann Mejia are always cramming the background of their space shots with, you know, there's a kitchen sink in the background. There's a bunch of shoes flying around in the background. Funny enough, ILM has actually done the exact same thing, without knowing that the other had done this. ILM threw a kitchen sink into the Revenge of the Sith space battle. I believe the Return of the Jedi space battle was famous for a shoe floating around in there.

I know from Lorne Peterson from ILM that a comic strip that Sergio Aragones did of Luke getting up from the cantina bar to go to the bathroom and finding all sorts of urinals for different alien physiognomies... that comic strip was apparently tacked up on the ILM model shop for years. There's a similar sensibility of these mad group of creators on opposite sides of the country doing all sorts of behind-the-scenes tinkering. There is a playful atmosphere at Skywalker Ranch, believe it or not. Even though it's a big billion dollar business, this whole idea of dressing up in a Jar Jar costume and running around on camcorder has a real kind of handmade sensibility to it. I think that's also something that handmade sensibility has a lot in common with what we do here at MAD Magazine.

And the fact that Lucasfilm never fired me means that they have a sense of humor. I mean, I "threatened" George with a "rifle" my first week at the Ranch as an intern on Indiana Jones. It was my first week on the Ranch working on Young Indy, I had this prop rifle that I had to take down to Skywalker Sound. So I'm walking down the path and George comes down the path. I see George and George sees me with the rifle, so I aim this rifle at George and say, "Hi, there's going to be some salary changes here at Skywalker Ranch!"

And George just stares at me. And then it occurs to me, this little voice in my head says, "Just because you know who George Lucas is, Bresman, doesn't mean that he knows who you are. And you're pointing a rifle at him!"

There's this terrible silence that lasts quite a long time. And then it finally clicks with me what I've done. So then I lower the rifle, and nervously croak out, "uh, hi Mr. Lucas. There doesn't have to be any changes here, if you... I'm the intern. First week." And he then lets me hang uncomfortably for a while, and finally he says. "All right, whatever. Just don't shoot any deer." So I didn't get fired for that.

What can Star Wars fans look forward to in your new book, MAD About Star Wars?

What was fun about MAD About Star Wars was not only taking 30 years of Star Wars and doing a trip down memory lane, but also I had the opportunity to supplement it with lots of behind-the-scenes stories, both on the Lucasfilm end of things and the MAD Magazine side of things.

For example, there's this great story when The Empire Strikes Back parody came out, MAD Magazine got a fan letter from George going on about how much he loved it. At almost the same time, MAD got a letter from George's lawyers saying "Cease and Desist, Withdraw All Publication, Give us An Accounting of All the Money You Made" and "There May Be Legal Action" ... the lawyers just really go at MAD. So, Bill Gaines, who was the publisher at the time (who is now deceased) on the one hand had George's letter, and on the other had this letter from his lawyers, so he sends the "George letter" to the lawyers and basically says, "Take it up with your boss." Basically, MAD never heard from Lucasfilm's lawyers again.

It was great to look at the stuff that MAD was doing in the day of the original trilogy and making jokes... like, maybe Darth Vader is Mr. T! And then, years later, Conan O'Brien did a little R2-Mr.T-2 when he had George on his show, and seeing how MAD was sort of fortune-telling back in the day. And it was also great to get other little stories like that from Jake Lloyd or Anthony Daniels where something that MAD did in the parody might actually have tied into something that MAD didn't know about actually happened on set. So you'll find all these great little stories annotating the MAD parodies in the MAD About Star Wars book.

I think both MAD and Star Wars fans and MAD Star Wars fans should have a good time with the book.