Cynical Cinema

There is a video that hit stores on Tuesday - it is the first Family Guy episode of the year, the hour-long Star Wars episode, and it is great. Now, of course, an hour-long episode really means 48 minutes, but with the bonus features on the disc, it is well over an hour in total, most of it terrific. The bonus features include a conversation between Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane and George Lucas, who is clearly one of his idols. Also, there is a featurette that plays every Family Guy Star Wars reference from the TV show up until this point. Also hilarious stuff. Clearly, the guys who do this TV show are bigger Star Wars nerds than anyone I know. Except for Dave Taylor, who has forty-one different copies of the trilogy, on DVD, VHS, Beta, reel-to-reel, slide show, and laser disc, among other formats. He also has eleven copies of the John Williams soundtrack, on CD, tape, 8-track, vinyl, and some formats I was not even aware had been invented yet.

But although I make fun of Dave every time I visit his place and sit among the shelves of Bob Fett action figures and Millenium Falcon commemorative cereal boxes, he is not alone. Not by a long shot. These people are out there. And they are otherwise normal in the rest of their lives, unlike the Star Trek geeks and the Lord of the Rings wackjobs and the Mr. Belvedere afficionados. This is because Star Wars holds a certain place in the hearts and minds (ooh, went all George W for a second there) of just about every single human being born after 1957. I, for one, was born about a year after the release of Star Wars. And yet it was still an integral part of my pop culture innundation throughout my life, so much so that even as a half-assed fan of the original series, I still know many lines, names, scenarios and moments from that original trilogy. In fact, the first movie has to be more familiar to the general population of the world than any other movie by far.

Which is why it’s the perfect pop culture spoof for a show such as Family Guy. For the purposes of this review, I will go ahead and assume that everyone, by now, is at least aware of Family Guy. (If not, watch it. It is the best comedy show on TV.) And Family Guy Presents Blue Harvest is what they do at their best. It is basically the entire Star Wars movie, condensed (easily, I might add) to 48 minutes, and featuring the cast of Family Guy in place of the characters in the film. The lines are basically lifted straight from the dialogue of the original movie, which seems lazy at first, but when the dialogue spins off, it becomes brilliant. The scenes where they poke fun of holes in the Star Wars plot are dead-on. The best one comes when Darth Vader is advised that the Death Star is 99.99 percent impregnable, except for this one two-metre wide hole which, if you fire a torpedo into it, would blow up the entire space station. He suggests perhaps covering that hole with plywood or something, but is voted down on the grounds of aesthetics.

Not content to simply lampoon the Star Wars phenomenon itself, Seth MacFarlane manages to get numerous other fantastic pop culture references into the movie - Judd Nelson shows up to deliver one line from The Breakfast Club. Rush Limbaugh voices himself as a right-wing bigot on Tatooine talk radio. Chevy Chase and Beverly D’Angelo show up to deliver two lines from National Lampoon’s vacation. There are also references to Simply Red, Tupac Shakur, Redd Foxx, and dozens more, almost all of them fantastic. In the end, the familiarity we all have with Star Wars gives Family Guy license to do whatever they want within that framework, and that works beautifully. Blue Harvest is well worth purchasing, for the Family Guy fan, the Star Wars fan, or anyone who enjoys a 40-minute belly laugh.