Park Wars Released

BillyC writes "Park Wars, the parody of Phantom Menace using characters from South Park, has been released! The final result is not what the creators originally intended - using over an hour of the film's actual audio would be shaky, legally speaking - but the final result is still pretty funny, and the visuals are certainly very impressive. It's available in both streaming and downloadable versions - Sorenson Quicktime only, unfortunately." I need funny. I need mac. Damn.

Comments

Unimaginative

[Malc]

The movie was well done, so all credit to authors for that. However, I thought parodies were supposed to be humourous, even original or satirical? This was boring. I got one laught: for 20 secs during the mid-film interruption. The rest was just a re-telling of the story with South Park characters. No wonder they were worried about being accused of plagiarism. So unimiginative.

Re:Lucas is consistent

[Accipiter]

What you're not realizing is that people have the right to parody.

Fair Use specifically covers the fact that if something comes out, anyone who wishes to do a parody or satire of it is perfectly within the law to do it. The same goes for criticism or comment.

"The Phantom Menace" is undoubtedly a trademarked phrase, yet you see it in movie reviews. The name "Luke Skywalker" is a trademarked name, yet it appears in countless articles. Why? Because it's legal to do so.

And while you say that this demo will be used in seeking future employment, you're probably right. Except, the authors of the parody are NOT using the trademarked characters to obtain their employment - the employer is judging based on creativity and/or technical skill. These merits would be the same even if this wasn't a parody.

They have every right to show off their skills.

-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

Link to movie clip

[Numeric]

This site has movie clips in Real Video and Windows Media.

http://fan.starwars.com/fanvault/files/video.htm l

Warning: This not the full movie.

A version for the rest of us

[Other]

I just encoded an mpeg version available at:
http://download.animedigita.com/parkwars/parkwars3 20.mpg (minus any spaces)

It's 78megs right now...yeesh. MPEG-4 would be better.

OMG! This is so great!

[citizenc]

Well, I just watched the film, and it is great -- especially the way they handled the George-Lucas-is-a-Greedy-Butt-Munch stuff: It is normal for the first half or so (following the film, using the sounds) ... and then Shelly, Stan's older sister, walks onto the set and launches into this big speech about copyright laws and stuff. =)

Does anybody know if the full film was ever finished?

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CitizenC

Too Bad George Lucas Didn't Do This:

[citizenc]

From The Park Wars Jedi Council:

Q: How hard was it to work around the legalities of South Park and Star Wars to create Park Wars?

Park Wars.. well long story, we didn't get any permission.. but comedy central lawyers contacted us, and basically said that since it was done so well and in such good fun, that they wouldn't be carrying out any legal actions, instead, they featured it on the comedy central's main page, and sent Ted and Me a whole bunch of cool Southpark stuff.

Why didn't George Lucas do THAT? It's the same idea as that "Wazzup Superfriends" animation that was floating around a while ago: both BUD -AND- the copyright holders of the Superfriends characters could have sued the pants off the creators.. but they didn't. Why? Because it, like Park Wars, was done in good fun. No money was changing hands here..

Dam you, George Lucas, for foxing a project with a massive amount of potential.

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CitizenC

Why didn't they use Flash?

[frankie]

I'm a raving evangelista, but you really don't need Sorenson for low resolution paper cutouts like South Park. Each character only has a half dozen moving parts and 3 poses (front, side, rear). A Flash animation could do it with BETTER image quality, lower file size, and of course wider compatibility.

(Alternately, someone could try to convince Steve Jobs to release QT5 for *nix)

Compare to AYB.swf -- Flash works freaking great for animation. Lastly, compare to the classic Star Wars ASCIImation. If you want to talk about "2 Much Time" -- just watching that one for a couple minutes makes me feel like the world's biggest slacker. Imagine the amount of brain drain it took to make the damn thing.

Give Poor George A Break

[CleverNickName]

People, put yourselves in poor George Lucas's shoes. He has consistently put out great quality entertainment (Willow, Ewok Adventures, Jar Jar Binks), and is just a struggling artist, not unlike the Park Wars guys. Now, George has to protect the "integrity" of his creation, right? I mean, he wouldn't just sit back and allow the complex mythology of Star Wars, the epic, timeless battle between good and evil, be reduced to something like a trade war, right? And he couldn't allow The Force become something like...oh, a virus, right? I mean, George has to keep a tight rein on these things, or who knows what could happen?

Oh, and he also needs to make more money.

/sarcasm

Lucas is consistent

[skoda]

Lucas has consistently guarded his properties with great zeal. This is nothing new, nor is it surprising. The end result is that Lucas has created a veritable empire of "Star Wars" properties, generally of very high quality (movie plots aside :), and has also made a tidy profit from them. And that's his perogative.

Furthermore, while "Park Wars" claims to be a not-for-profit endeavor, and is likely a 'labor of love', it should also be expected that this would be used as a demo, in the least, in seeking future employment. As such, they would clearly be seeking to (indirectly) profit from Lucas' work. Furthermore, they wrote that Comedy Central used it for part of one of their programs. Thus, Comedy Central would also seek to profit, indirectly, from Lucas' property.

I have a hard time getting worked up about George Lucas & co. stopping others from using over an hour of their work without licensing.

-----
D. Fischer

Park Wars

[Cheese_isgood]

Oh my God I've killed Obi!