Neufweek was a creature of Pilot Productions. Pilot was a movie production company created by my friends in high school - Doug Woods, Dan Pollaci, Larry Scott, Joe Zavorksi, Mitch Rudman, Allisan Chandler, Fleming and several others. We made spoofs of popular films. Our best proiductions were: 2001: A Movie and Tarzan. 2001 obviously spoofed a famous film of a similar title. Tarzan spoofed Star Wars. It was shown to Gary Kurtz (?) the producer of SW, who enjoyed it very much. Whether Lucas ever saw it or not we're not sure, but the fact that he's still alive is a good indication that he hasn't seen it. Tarzan featured Larry Scott wrapped in aluminum foil (as the C3P0 character) and a space battle that replicated the ship models and Death Star as fruit. Tie and X-Wing fighters were oranges and tomatoes with forks stuck in them. Visual effects deliberately showed the hands holding the 'models'. Sound effects were achieved by the simple expedient of having our actors say 'voom' and 'mroooow' The Death Star (a honeydew mellon) was eviscerated with an M80 firecracker.

Sadly, these films are now lost.

Doug Woods and Dan Pollaci were the nominal editors for Neufweek and they haunted me for copy. I'd always wanted to do a comic strip and thus Fred Snarn in Space was born. The episode above is the first ever.

Fred Snarn was Pilot's mascot, always depicted as a face on a balloon. Depsite the complete lack of a body, Fred can do anything.

The insanity piece - well, at least I was writing for publication.

The poems - that's another story. My college newspaper (for which I produced an award-winning piece on nuclear power) got into the bad habit of running a poetry corner. My friends and I used to read it out loud in the dorms for the amusement factor. The poems were so bad that I was prompted to submit my own deliberately bad poetry and you can see the results. The reprint in Neufweek only goes to show that bad poetry never goes away, it just gets repackaged.

If any Pilot alum are out there, I'll be happy to scan additional issues. I'm particularly interested in getting ahold of the 'Steve Davidson Interview' issue where I can be seen pushing the button that starts WW3.