Watch This Space
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday February 23, 2008
Family Guy moves to a neighbourhood far, far away, writes Michael Idato.
As the screen fades to black, the luminous blue letters are unmistakeable. "A long time ago, but somehow in the future ..." It should be a Star Wars film but as the text crawl glides into the distant field of stars it quickly becomes apparent that Family Guy: Blue Harvest is much more than that. "It is a time of civil war, and renegade paragraphs floating through space," the crawling text says before giving way to the opening scene in which the rebel corvette Tantive IV is captured by a Star Destroyer (with a Bush-Cheney campaign sticker tacked beneath its ion engines).After six seasons of regular Star Wars gags, Family Guy, the dark, dry animated comedy rescued from the TV dustbin by soaring DVD sales and put back into production, has bit the bullet and produced a one-hour animated adaptation of the original 1977 film Star Wars, later known as Episode IV: A New Hope. Blue Harvest (the name comes from the production code name used for the Star Wars sequel Return Of The Jedi) uses the Family Guy characters to portray the key personalities of the film - Lois Griffin is Princess Leia, Peter Griffin is Han Solo, Chris Griffin is Luke Skywalker and baby Stewie is Darth Vader. "It became a natural progression to actually do it," producer Chris Sheridan says. "To say, 'Enough of these little bits, here and there. Let's just do an entire episode that's Star Wars.' "The episode is astonishingly good, respectful to the original film while milking the Star Wars franchise for the kind of gags Family Guy fans would expect. In one scene C-3PO calls Luke a freak for shooting wamp rats in his T-16, to which Luke replies: "There's two suns and no women. What the hell am I supposed to do?"It also manages to load itself with all manner of pop culture references including Deal Or No Deal, Grey Poupon mustard, Real Player, Simpsons theme composer Danny Elfman, the Tom Baker-era Doctor Who and the animated shows Futurama and American Dad (watch the cantina scene closely). "Family Guy is so much about popular culture and Star Wars is the most prominent piece of pop culture of the past 30 years," says co-producer David A. Goodman. "It overshadows almost anything else." Supervising producer and writer Alec Sulkin agrees. "I don't know any book or any piece of literature ever, the way I know Star Wars," Sulkin says.Assistant director Joseph Lee says the biggest challenge was retelling the Star Wars story - the capture of Princess Leia, the escape of the droids, Luke and Han's Death Star mission and the Battle of Yavin - while retaining the visual signature of Family Guy. "It was [a case of] cracking that code visually, to see what we could do to still keep the essense of the original New Hope, yet still retain some of the new gags and lines and the spirit of Family Guy," he says.What raises the stakes, however, is that it was all done with Star Wars creator-producer George Lucas's blessing.Lucas has also given the makers permission to adapt the first two Star Wars sequels, The Empire Strikes Back and Return Of The Jedi. The first, titled Something, Something, Something, Dark Side, based on The Empire Strikes Back, will air on US television later this year. Sulkin acknowleges he may have used the title Blue Harvest a little too soon. "It would have made way more sense to call the Return Of The Jedi episode Blue Harvest. I feel badly that I burned that title." Star Wars: Blue Harvest is on DVD through 20th Century Fox. Turn to page 20 to win a Family Guy DVD pack.
© 2008 Sydney Morning Herald