The Past Reclamation Project, Part II

The Making of Star Snores

A Trash Tribune Star Wars Parody

What me, Trash Tribune?

Like many kids growing up in the 70s, I was a big fan of Mad Magazine. In the mid-70s, a neighbor friend and I created our own, crude version of a Mad-style magazine that we dubbed "Trash Tribune." It was an amateur effort created by a couple creative kids with way too much time on their hands. Each issue was produced with type-written copy, the occasional letter-press lettering, and hand-drawn pictures by yours truly. My friend's mother would then take the resulting paste-up and Xerox it at her office on whatever colored paper she had available. We sold precious few copies of each issue, mostly to friends and relatives, and friends of relatives. We only produced half a dozen issues or so before other distractions drew our attention away and, sadly, none of those issues survive today. Those that did exist were left behind long ago in the move from my parents' house. Not much remains from that early creative period, just a handful of drawings and paintings that my brother had snatched up and kept from my parents' purging. Years later, he handed me a box full of my artwork saying that he had kept them thinking I might want them some day. In the box were the pieces of what you see here.

Star Snores: 30+ Years in the Making

This panel, before color correction, shows the ragtag nature of the drawing materials (yellowed with age). Note also the page/panel notation in pencil.

The movie Star Wars was released in May of 1977, and that summer, at the age of 14, I began creating my own Mad-style parody intended for a future issue of the Trash Tribune. Each individual drawing was done on whatever kind of random scrap of paper I could find, including cheap newsprint, lightweight typewriting paper (probably pilfered from my parents), graph paper, lined notebook paper, some nice, heavy rag-free drawing paper, and even one thick piece of black cardboard on which I painted stars for the opening splash page using Wite-Out. These individual pieces were all stuffed inside a folder some thirty odd years ago, never to see the light of day again, until only just recently. I'm not sure how I intended them to go together, the only clue I had was page and panel notations that I had made on each drawing. As I put it together, completing a project started 30 some years ago, I've tried to remain true to those notations as closely as I could. It wasn't possible in all cases (I certainly didn't plan it out completely back then), but still, in all, I was able to make it all work together with just a little finagling.

Sources, That is, Who's to Blame for All This?

The writing is all me — vintage 1977 — every dumb joke of it. But, I blame Mad Magazine for their heavy influence on me at the time. Recently, I've had a chance to find Mad's own parody of Star Wars, called "Star Roars," and I have to say, although their art is naturally far, far superior, as far as writing goes, nothing in my version is any stupider than they have in theirs, especially for being written by a 14-year-old kid! And, after reading it again for the first time in some 30-odd years, I was suprised to find that some of it is actually somewhat clever.

I'd like to say the artwork is just rough sketches and that the real illustrations were to come, but I'm pretty sure that's not true. Though, in some cases, it may be as some are obviously quite rushed while others are a bit more polished. One thing I can say for it though is that it shows a 14-year-old's lack of concern for whether or not it's good enough; it just is what it is. (Sometimes I wish I could be that kid again.)

I'm not sure, after all this time, what all my references for the artwork were. As you can see, most of the art is pretty bad and obviously (to me anyway) it was drawn directly from my mind with no reference, but there are scenes that were just as obviously drawn from movie stills (e.g. 3,1 and 10,1). I did that a lot in those days; I had pretty good hand-eye coordination and could look at something and sketch it down fairly accurately. In those days I was constantly drawing pictures from magazine photos, comic books and movie stills. Drawing favorite sports stars, super heroes, and plenty of scenes from the movies, and Star Wars in particular (Space 1999 being another favorite). It's clear that some of these panels fall into that category. There may even be some direct pilfering from comics. Obviously some of the panels are better composed than most and I suspect the source for those may have been the Star Wars comics published by Marvel, but I'm not 100% sure of that as I don't have those comics anymore to check back against.

Be that as it may, here for the first time ever is "Star Snores," my version of Star Wars parody circa 1977. Enjoy it for what it is....

Bob Schmitt
April 2010

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