Last week we brought you Hardware Wars, so this week we’re going to treat you to a companion piece (done by a totally different collection of people), Closet Cases of the Nerd Kind. These were released together on a VHS cassette along with several other parody shorts back in the days of movie rentals.

This short parody from 1980 should be familiar to anybody who had HBO in the early 1980s. They used it for filler between movies for several years. Closet Cases was written and produced by Rick Harper and Bob Rogers,

In the film, sewage worker Roy Dreary and a number of unusual characters meet up with strange extraterrestrials traveling to earth in a giant pie in the sky. Dreary develops an obsession with mashed potatoes, whipped cream, and maraschino cherries. He encounters singing mailboxes, truck radios that spout bubbles and bubble music, and one pie in the face after another, before finally finding himself at the Sara Loo pie factory-and his close encounter of the nerd kind.

Of the filmmakers, Bob Rogers went on to have a legendary career as a design engineer and producer for Disney, and has produced and directed Oscar-nominated short films. Rick Harper directed two documentary shorts before vanishing from the world of movie-making in 1984.

Be prepared for the music at the end to stick in your head for forty years.  It did with me.