TV Review: 'Family Guy: The Star Wars Episode'

By Daniel Fienberg September 21, 2007

'Family Guy' Star Wars EpisodeWhen it was announced that "Family Guy" had been given permission to do a "Star Wars" parody for its season premiere, I had a pretty good idea of how the episode would go.

Peter Griffin walks in on Meg's messy room and says, "Geez Meg, you're an even sloppier roommate than Bib Fortuna."

Cut to: Bib Fortuna trying to clean up his apartment, but constantly knocking things over with the long, wormy things sticking out of his neck.

Or Quagmire starts flirting with an ugly woman and Cleveland says, "This is even worse than the time you got turned on by a Sarlacc."

Cut to: Quagmire staring at the disgusting tentacled surface of the Sarlacc yelling "Giggity, Giggity."

Too geeky? My apologies.

In any case, "Family Guy," a series often accused of sacrificing coherent narrative for non-sequitor digressions, gets a surprising boost of creative energy from the season premiere titled "Blue Harvest" (if you don't get the in-joke, you may want to skip the episode). Not only does the officially authorized "Star Wars" story (along with music, specific images and sound effects) yield one of the series' most consistently funny episodes, but it also provides Seth McFarlane with a structure that helps the episode hold together even at a slightly padded hour.

After the most minimal of introductions -- the Griffins are watching Sunday golf when the power goes out, forcing them to entertain themselves -- Sunday's (Sept. 23) "Family Guy" shifts right into the narrative of "Star Wars IV," only barely condensing "A New Hope." Chris is Luke, Lois is Leia, Stewie is Darth Vader, Peter and Brian are Han Solo and Chewy, Quagmire and Cleveland are C3PO and R2, the pervy old man is Obi Wan and Mila Kunis must have had something else to do, because Meg only pops up in a brief cameo.

Rather than delivering a "Family Guy"-style episode of random-cutaways, "Blue Harvest" plays with a nearly "MST3K"-style wit, poking reverential fun at the beloved movie in the same way that millions upon millions of Lucas-loving geeks have done over the years. Why does the cantina band on Mos Eisley only know one song? Why does the movie repeatedly grind to a halt to genuflect at the altar of John Williams and the London Philharmonic? And why didn't somebody just board up that one weakness in the Death Star that any engineer could easily see on the blueprints? There are still a few moments of typical "Family Guy" indulgence, but they're the episode's weakest parts, particularly when Obi Wan pauses to serenade Luke with "I've Had the Time of my Life." While not quite as profanely clever as the classic "Clerks" debate about the fate of independent contractors on the Death Star, "Family Guy" achieves something of the same effect.

It's a slight disadvantage that the "Family Guy" homage to "Star Wars" has to come so close on the heels of the similarly gentle mockery on "Robot Chicken." Preferences between the two George Lucas-endorsed send-offs are likely to be split, but "Family Guy" addresses any controversy in a conversation in which Peter and Chris (voiced, of course, by Seth Green, also a co-creator of "Robot Chicken") discuss whether or not "Robot Chicken" is watched by enough people as a creative precedent. There's actually very little punchline overlap between the two, but as funny as the "Family Guy" episode may have been, nothing in Sunday night's hour can compete with "Robot Chicken's" Admiral Ackbar cereal (Now with brine shrimp!).

You were wrong. What we got was almost a shot-for-shot remake in places, with funny asides. It was almost *reverent*.

The Obi Wan thing was funny as hell though. *

In article , [email] (PV) wrote:

Indeed. I found it interesting that they did NOT do the wretched special edition stuff (Han capped Greedo, and not a Praxis wave in sight) but they DID do the first retcon, Episode 4 A New Hope, and not the original.

Obi Wan left me cold, but I've never seen that character before (I've only just started watching Family Guy) so I had NO idea what the hell they were going for there. It's since been explained to me who he was; that might make a difference.

I did like that there was a payoff for the couch gag.

What happened to Puddy?

[email] wrote:

Thanks gawd there were no Praxis waves!

You mean Joe the crippled?

I noticed the coach from Home Movies in the background at the cantina/bar.

In article , Ubiquitous wrote:

Yeah.

His scene was cut. I understand he woulda been Biggs Darklighter. It'll be on the DVD, for sure.

In article , Sean Walsh wrote:

LOL

[email] wrote:

No sign of him; Perhaps he'll show up as Yoda if they do thisd again?

Did you notice Evil Monkey, Bender, and Roger (from AmDad) in the cantina?

In article , Ubiquitous wrote:

nope; good think I saved it. :)

Anim8rFSK wrote:

Now that he has his own show, maybe he doesn't have time anymore. But wouldn't he have been good as R2?

In article , Mark Nobles wrote:

oh god

that's funny

In article , Mark Nobles wrote:

That's what I was expecting.

In article , Barry Margolin wrote:

I love this show. Just saw Stewie do William Shatner's ROCKET MAN video. Without even explanation or set-up. It was brilliant.

That was pretty good, but I preferred the Zapp Brannigan version, where everyone abandoned ship when he started it. *

PV wrote:

Except he didn't do "Rocket Man", but a similarly styled version of "Lola" (with Leela) substituted.

Brian

Patrick Warburton doesn't do a ton of stuff on FAMILY GUY. He's in most episodes but not all.

Plus for all we know he does several episodes of dialogue in 1 sitting.

He would've. We'll have to wait for the DVD to see his cut scenes as Biggs.

In article , Sean Walsh wrote:

he's been in every ep I've seen 'til Star Wars, but then it's a small sample.

"So to speak"

IIRC they introduced him late in the 1st season.

The world of cartoon voice work is a strange and wonderful thing. It would also completely destroy my appreciation for animation, I'm sure, knowing all the ins and outs of it.

In article , Sean Walsh wrote:

Oh, sometimes. Then you get something like Family Guy, and knowing what they must go through to get ANY of this on the air makes you love it that much more.

In article , Ubiquitous wrote:

I never understood why people objected to stuff like that-- things that were pure SFX and didn't really affect the storyline (as opposed to Greedo/Han scene). Adding some flourish to the huge explosions was a way of distinguishing them from the lesser explosions-- like the TIE fighters blowing up-- which pretty much looked identical prior to the revisions.

What annoys me is not so much that Lucas changed or "improved" some scenes, but rather his choice of which scenes to "improve".

There's one bit in "Return of the Jedi" that could have been spectacular with today's SFX capabilities: when Vader's Super Star Destroyer careens out of control and slams into the surface of the Death Star.

A 15-mile-long starship smashing into the Death Star would create an explosion of magnificent proportions (and realistically would probably have destroyed the space station, relieving the Rebels of the job of having to do it themselves). Instead, what we got was what looked like an obvious model punching through a piece of plastic and a sudden spurt of flame from a blowtorch. Pretty sad even by the standards of the day.

If Lucas was gonna go changing things, I'd have much preferred he cut out that old bit altogether and replaced it with a nice CGI sequence that brought home just how titanic a collision that truly was.

Instead, he goes about inserting shots of Jar-Jar creatures dancing on the rooftops and shouting "Wesa free!"

sigh....

Also Roger from "American Dad".

In article , Howard wrote:

Oh, for Christ sake. It's "Star Wars". The entire concept defies physics. For one thing, you don't hear big booming explosions in space.

.....unless you BELIEVE you can. ;p

So how do you actually *know* that for a fact, hm? ;)

In article , BTR1701 wrote:

Because they looked like crap. Non creative producers were asking us to stick them in everything for years. Somebody even wrote a plug in to do it called "BSR" for "Big Stupid Ring"

It was the kind of crap you expect in a low rent Sci Fi Channel Saturday Night movie - not STAR WARS.

And looked better. The Praxis wave stuff looks stupid. I mean, what possible mechanism CAUSES that? You get a ring like that if you light gasoline on a floor, but in space?

gah

In article , Anim8rFSK wrote:

Looked fine to me. At least better than what was originally there.

Nah, I remember being underwhelmed even as a kid when the Death Star went. I remember thinking that those little ships looked cooler exploding than this thing that's supposed to be the size of a moon.

Maybe the same mechanism that causes sound to propagate in a vacuum?

It's fantasy. Explosions don't make rings like that and they don't make noise in a vacuum, either. Yet people complain about the former but seem perfectly fine with the latter.

Strange.

In article , BTR1701 wrote:

People complain about sound in space movies loudly and routinely. But the fact that they get one thing wrong doesn't mean they should go in and change other things to make them worse to match.

In article , Anim8rFSK wrote:

I just can't get that worked up about it. Star Wars was essentially a live-action cartoon. I'm no more worried about the physical properties of explosive expansion while watching Star Wars than I worry about why Wile E. Coyote can repeatedly fall off a cliff and survive.

BTR1701 wrote:

Not to mention why he doesn't just order out for pizza.

In article , peachy ashie passion wrote:

Pizza delivery became common years later.

Also noticed the evil monkey and Bender from Futurama in the cantina scene.

"peachy ashie passion" wrote in message news:Ko%Ji.3268$Wo4.634@trnddc03...

How would a pizza blow up the Death Star?!?

Oh, you meant Wile E.

Quoting Cliff from Cheers:

"It's not that Wile E wants to eat, nor that he wants to eat a roadrunner. It's that he want to eat that particular bird. It's very existential."

He's a toon and the only way to hurt a toon is to break his heart.

"Tony Harding" wrote in message news:ca2Ki.244$[email]...

make

seem

And The Dip!

Jason

Jason Maxwell wrote:

<snip>

Ack, I forgot about DIP! Ahhhhhh!

Despite my just complaining about this in my previous post, the addition "of Episode IV: A new hope" happened so early that many people who are rabid fans of the movies still don't believe that it was ever otherwise.

Yeah, you missed a lot of funny stuff if you don't know the secondary characters. Greedo was based on one (who's sort of a cross between Mr. Rogers and that "happy tree" painting guy from PBS), which added even more laughs to how that scene played out.

As an animator, I can see where you might hate and avoid family guy - it has some of the flattest looking visuals of any cartoon I've ever seen. But I think the apparent artlessness is entirely on purpose.

Yeah, great comedic timing there. The bit between Chris and Peter about Robot Chicken (with Chris defending it of course) was brilliant too. *

In article , [email] (PV) wrote:

Indeed, at one point ILM themselves fell prey to the revisionist history, but last I saw, they had their historian look into it and admitted on the Lucasfilm official site that ep 4 ANH is in fact a retcon.

No, I can handle Family Guy fine (and I agree with your reasoning above), I just didn't know about it for whatever reason 'til recently. This is the first ep I saw in it's original time slot; I've been seeing sporadic reruns in the middle of the night, and at first was CERTAIN I was hallucinating. Now, Dr. Katz, that I hated and avoided. Same notation for Rugrats; I refused to even work on it. Thornberries I came to like though.

Yep.  :)

Those of us who saw it in first run could have told them that!

Cartoon network runs it as part of the adult swim block, and that runs well into the wee hours of the morning. So you probably weren't hallucinating. They also ran it all over the place before fox picked it up again, so it's been on in weird time slots for years now. I think even fox was doing that for a while. *

In article , [email] (PV) wrote:

They didn't believe us. :\

the first thing I saw, the baby . . . Stewie? . . . climbed into bed and the father thought he was the wife and was squeezing his nose saying "well hello mr nipple" and from there it got worse. Middle of the night, fell asleep with the TV on, woke up to that . . .

Anim8rFSK wrote:

Personally I set the tv to jump to specific channels all through the night so that doesn't happen to me.

I hate waking up to infomercials.

In article , peachy ashie passion wrote:

LOL, yeah, informercials is about all we have here after a certain hour. :(

Anim8rFSK wrote:

    Ooh, that bites.
    Thanks to the wonder of National Geographic and Animal Planet,
combined with Discovery Science and Discovery Times, I NEVER have to be
without some sort of actual programming.

In article , peachy ashie passion wrote:

We have 24 hour programming on the higher level digital channels, but not the low end tier available in the bedroom. :\

Anim8rFSK wrote:

I'm very sorry to hear that.

I'd be pretty miserable without my all night tv.

In article , peachy ashie passion wrote:

AMC and TCM run all night. But mostly it's GIRLS GONE WILD on EVERY-FREAKING-CHANNEL.

Anim8rFSK wrote:

Oh, I'd never get to sleep!!

In article , peachy ashie passion wrote:

snort

Anim8rFSK wrote:

I very carefully choose documentaries that won't be too exciting and intrude on my dreams, nor keep me awake when I wake up in the night. :)

Girls Gone Wild wouldn't fit the bill.

In article , peachy ashie passion wrote:

If GGW ran different ads maybe, but they've been running the same GGW Island blurb for months, on every channel, over and over and over and over; it's just background noise now.

And no, I haven't ordered GGW Island, thank you very much!

Anim8rFSK wrote:

You've seen way more than I have. Clearly.

In article , peachy ashie passion wrote:

Well, when the same infomercial is on a dozen channels every night for months, it doesn't take much flipping to end up seeing it all. Repeatedly.

I can't imagine what their ad buy must be; I think it runs half an hour or something, but it's not nearly that long, it just repeats endlessly.

"Anim8rFSK" wrote in message news:[email]...

Probably the single most disturbing scene that comes to mind when I think of family Guy is the one where Peter (father) tries to breastfeed Stewie (baby). The look of sheer horror on Stewie's face when he wakes up and removes chest hair from his mouth is utterly fecking hilarious.

In article , "Beeblebear" <[email] the presidentfsnet.co.uk> wrote:

shudder

something to look forward to

:)

"Anim8rFSK" wrote in message news:[email]...

3rd season IIRC. Peter has gone on sensitivity training to help him relate better to women, and he comes back a feminist. Other classic moments in that story include Peter telling Lois his period is late, so he might be pregnant, and when she points out he can't have children - he's a man, his response is "I'm a Catholic, I don't have any choice!!" And later he addresses a black rights march and tells them that they are what is wrong with American society. (He is saying it because they are all male.)

[email] says...

Consider yourself lucky it wasn't the scene where Peter tried to nurse Stewie...

In article , [email] wrote:

I'm tired of Herbert, quite frankly. He's a one-note character and he's gross. I *REALLY* hated the segment with him singing that song from Flashdance.

On Mon, 24 Sep 2007 14:05:36 -0400, Ubiquitous wrote:

The song was from Dirty Dancing, not Flashdance. But yes, he's getting a bit old (no pun intended). I hope he meets the same fate as the Vaudeville guys.

Same here, also time to put Jesse out of our misery.

EXACTLY! The show strings along a thin plot using random throw-backs to fill time. This is amateur programming at best. The reason why I'll NEVER respect Seth and FG.

Taylor wrote:

} EXACTLY! The show strings along a thin plot using } random throw-backs to fill time. This is amateur } programming at best. The reason why I'll NEVER } respect Seth and FG.

Most "Family Guy" episodes are sloppily structured; numerous flashback gags and movie/TV parody gags unrelated to the plot are routinely thrown in out of left field. But I can easily tolerate the lack of structure or cohesiveness as long as the show makes me laugh, and it always does.

If you had to choose between well-structured and unfunny versus badly structured and funny, which would you prefer?

In article , repost_plz wrote:

IIRC, they didn't have the rights to the clips for DVD.

repost_plz wrote:

} Did you ever see "Dream On"? } Great use of flash-backs and cut-aways. } I wish they would release it on DVD.

It was a great series! It was somewhat reminiscent of "Seinfeld" which came later. One thing that made no sense is that the main character, Martin Tupper, grew up watching loads of TV, and grew up to be a book editor. It would be more logical if he worked in a TV-related industry.

Anyhow, the first two seasons HAVE been released on DVD! They are available online on Amazon, Barnes and Noble.com, eBay, and Movies Unlimited.

If there is any other TV series you "wish" would be released on DVD, just do a simple search on one of these web sites; you may find that your wish has been granted!

[email] says...

But weren't most of the clips from old movies? And how DID they manage to find the right clips for the scene in question? Surely they didn't have computer databases back then...

Oooh!

In article , Ubiquitous wrote:

Yes, entirely

I think they wrote backwards to match the clips.

And don't call me Shirley.

Here's how the script writing session must've gone.

Writer: We need a really good joke for when the Tie Fighters attack the Millennium Falcon.

Seth McFarlane: Hey, I was just watching Airplane! last night. Why don't we have Leslie Nielsen appear and say, "I just want you to know, we're all counting on you."

Writer: Okay. So how do we alter it to fit the storyline? Maybe have C3P0 say the line?

SMcF: No, no, no. There's no reason to alter a perfectly good joke. We'll just have Leslie Nielsen come in and say the line.

Writer: But if we do that, we're just ripping off Airplane! It's complete unoriginal and makes us look like hacks.

SMcF: What fucking show do you think you're writing for?

In article , Sean O'Hara wrote:

That's the thing. FG is all about throwing in random pop culture references, particularly from the 70's and 80's. McFarlane is clearly a conoissseur of movies and TV shows of that era. And since that's when I was in my teens and 20's, I have a nostalgic appreciation for his gags.

In the Year of the Golden Pig, the Great and Powerful Barry Margolin declared:

"*His* gags"? That's a Zucker gag, stolen wholesale. It's one thing to reference movies for a joke, it's another to simply recycle a joke from a movie.

The Futurama episode with Cylon and Garfunkle -- funny reference to '70s pop culture.

The Family Guy episode that repeats jokes straight from Airplane! -- total hackery.