Hardware Wars follows robots 4-Q-2 and Artie-Deco who escape an evil Empire aboard a cassette tape ship to land on a watermelon planet. A young boy named Fluke Starbucker finds a holographic message from Princess Anne-Droid inside a vacuum cleaner memory bank. He joins forces with Augie Ben Doggie and the Red-Eye Knights to defeat the villain Darph Nader.
Ernie Fosselius created this 13-minute film in 1978 with an eight-thousand-dollar budget. He secured narration from veteran voice-over artist Paul Frees for the project. The production utilized deliberately ridiculous household objects as props throughout filming.
The Württemberg Philharmonic Orchestra under conductor Jonel Perlea performed the soundtrack for Hardware Wars. It featured only one song Richard Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries which appears for the entire duration of the short film. No other musical cues appear in the final cut of the project.
Hardware Wars grossed one million dollars despite its paltry eight-thousand-dollar budget. Its profit ratio exceeded that of Star Wars according to industry reports. The film won over fifteen first-place film festival awards including Most Popular Short Film at the Chicago Film Festival.
MVD Rewind Collection re-released the short on DVD the 23rd of April 2024 followed by Blu-ray May 7. The Blu-ray contains a 2024 remastered 2K transfer from a 16mm reversal print created by Vinegar Syndrome. It also includes a 2K HD transfer made in 2012 supervised by Ernie Fosselius himself.