FAMILY GUY STAR WARS

I watched my very first Family Guy episode last Sunday evening. Okay, I lie, I have seen a couple minutes here or there. What was significant about this episode of the animated series is that in the one hour, the entire very first Star Wars film was parodied. I do like the original SW movie very much, it's the best in the series (well, it's in a tie with The Empire Strikes Back, perhaps), so when I saw a newspaper ad for this installment of Family Guy, well, I had to put my pen down for an hour and watch.

It was pretty funny. Needless to say, the producers of FG poked fun at some of the irregularities and incongruities of the now iconic story. As I was a teenager when the flick first entered this galaxy, I did notice a few of these problems. Stewy, the little football-shaped-head baby played Darth Vader. During the conference room scene, Stewy, due to his short stature, is standing on the table. He asks the senator -- the one who is boasting the ultimate power of the new battle station, called the Death Star -- if there is a chance that the Death Star could be blown to bits. The senator admits that there is a tiny chance that if someone were to send a torpedo into a certain unprotected hole, well, the Death Star could be blown to bits. Stewy Vader freaks; he holds up his little hands and says, "whoa, whoa, whoa... that's a big design flaw!" He wastes no time in stating the obvious corrective measures, by asking, "could we put a piece of plywood over the hole?" I gave this moment my biggest laugh burst.

The funniest protracted moment or moments, and ones which would get me doing my patented rolling giggling laugh in perpetuity, started with the recreation of the trash compactor scene. While in the muck of water and garbage, Han Solo spots an old beaten up couch. He decides he has to have it; later, during the mad dash by our heroes through a hail of stormtrooper blaster fire in their attempt to reach the safety of the Millenium Falcon, Han and Chewbacca run with this couch across the hanger bay. After the others are in the ship, Han and Chewbacca try to get the furniture up the ramp. "Try tilting it this way and I will push", is the sort of business discussed while blaster fire continues to zip across the screen. As I said, I found this to be uproarious.

A less funny line but spot on in its directness happened earlier in the episode, as it also happened earlier in SW. That was the famous cantina scene where we are introduced to Han. Pudgy Luke Skywalker, played by the Family Guy's kid, I assume, decides to ask about the quality of Solo's ship. Just like the feature film's dialogue, the pirate answers, "... it's the ship that made the Kessel run in less than twelve parsec". Smart boy Luke, speaking for all of us, asks, "isn't a parsec not a measure of time but of distance?" Han quickly gets defensive; he waves his arms and says, "never, never mind!"

A good gag would have gone something like this: The SW theme music starts up and after just a few bars in, someone says, "... oh, for a moment there I thought we were going to be satirizing Kings Row".

Too obscure, I know.