Family Guy: Blue Harvest

At the recommendation of several of my students, I watched the Family Guy – Blue Harvest, the Family Guy Star Wars parody episode. Although there was a fair bit of rude humor and other aspects that are not for the faint hearted, some of it was so well done as to deserve a recommendation.

Among the funniest moments were these [SPOILERS ALERT]:

Princess Leia trying to save her message for Obi-Wan, and R2D2’s interface is like Windows. The menu says things like “You need to download Real Player 7 to continue”…

Tatooine’s talk radio station WTAT discusses the liberal media’s claims that Hoth is melting.

John Williams gives a live performance of the wonderful, haunting music that plays while Luke watches the binary sunset. As a result, conductor and orchestra are all killed when the Stormtroopers come back looking for the droids – which leads Luke to complain that now they’ll have to do the rest of the show with Danny Elfman!

Han Solo says that hyperspace always looks so freaky – and out the cockpit is the opening from the Tom Baker season of Doctor Who.

On Death Star News, in order to reassure those who found the destruction of Alderaan controversial, report on the finding of weapons of mass destruction on the planet. They also report on the Ewok pride parade.

On the Death Star, they try to find their way around using a mall map, encounter the imperial march as elevator music, end up in a Stormtrooper church, and try to take a couch with them that had been thrown away, which they found in the trash compactor.

I have no plans to ever watch Family Guy again. If you are unfamiliar with the series, be warned that it is not at all for children: the episode I watched contains profanity, drug references, allusions to Obi Wan Kenobi having been a pedophile, and all sorts of other nastiness that is supposed to be funny. But as far as adults are concerned, anyone who is a Star Wars fan ought to see this one episode (which you can watch online) of Family Guy. There is enough great Star Wars humor in it to make it worth putting up with the rest. And be sure to watch it all the way through to the end, where there is a self depricating reference to Robot Chicken having beaten them to the punch with its own cartoon Star Wars spoof!