When Star Wars stars Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, and Carrie Fisher announced they were returning for Star Wars: The Force Awakens last year, a fair number of fans immediately thought of “Weird Al” Yankovic’s song “Yoda.”
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Written to the tune of “Lola” by The Kinks — of whom Hamill is a self-proclaimed “huge fan! — Yankovic’s song told the story of Luke Skywalker’s interactions with Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back.
One particular passage, though, stoked the sense of humor of the internet when Hamill and company came back:
Well, I heard my friends really got in a mess
So I’m gonna have to leave Yoda, I guess
But I know that I’ll be coming back some day
I’ll be playing this part ’til I’m old and gray
The long-term contract I had to sign
Says I’ll be making these movies till the end of time
With my Yoda, Yo Yo Yo Yo Yoda, Yo Yo Yo Yo Yoda
The joke at the time, of course, was that because Star Wars was an incredibly lucrative franchise, the series would never end and Hamill would be locked in as Luke Skywalker forever. It might have seemed a little less-than-prescient years later, when the franchise revival came in the form of prequels that didn’t star Hamill and company at all — but it took on a new sense of irony when, at over 60 years old, he returned to the action-hero role that made him famous.
When ComicBook.com spoke with Hamill earlier this week about his new series Mark Hamill’s Pop Culture Quest on Comic-Con HQ, it took a little coaxing before he remembered the passage…but once he did, he remembered just what he thought when he first heard the song in 1985.
“I remember thinking, ‘Well, he’s just wrong!’” Hamill said. “We had a beginning, a middle, and an end. I knew they were going to do the prequels, and then I thought when they flashed forward, we weren’t signed for seven, eight, and nine, so my assumption was that it would just be all new characters whenever he got around to it. Then really soon after he started the prequels, I remember George [Lucas] saying that was it, that he’s done with it.”
Of course, it kind of makes sense that Hamill would have thought the song was a little out of touch: when Yankovic wrote it in between movies, a lot of the jokes would have made more sense than they did five years later when he finally untangled the mess of rights and approvals to release the song (he had to work with both Lucasfilm and The Kinks).
He added that “old and gray” doesn’t resonate with him much anyway. “I’m 65, but I don’t feel that way,” Hamill said. “My view of what 65 would be like back when I was 25 was much different. When you get to be this age, it’s kind of shocking because I keep thinking, ‘When am I going to stop liking Sgt. Bilko and The Three Stooges and bubble gum and Jimmy Olsen comics? Aren’t I eventually going to grow out of all these things that are meant to be just for kids? And those things have so far never happened to me.”
The first episode of Mark Hamill’s Pop Culture Quest, in which he gets a little bit meta and starts looking into The Joker, can be seen on the DC Entertainment YouTube page. After that, you can find it weekly on Comic Con HQ.
