by charby

Created on: June 25, 2010

Family Guy: Blue Harvest is essentially a remake of Star Wars Episode 4: A New Hope, but with the Family Guy characters taking the place of the main characters and with a shorter running time of 45 minutes. Instead of just being a straight remake it is more of a pisstake, and has lots of jokes scattered throughout it and bizarre additions that are very much done in a Family Guy style. The fact that it isn’t simply a word for word remake makes this ‘film’ more enjoyable than it could have been, and references to things that Star Wars fans would understand and find funny were good additions to the story.  It wasn’t a bad version and the jokes certainly made Blue Harvest watchable.

However, I can’t say that I massively enjoyed watching this episode/film. Firstly, I don’t really know what the point of making a Family Guy version of Star Wars was, as I imagine that it would just really annoy die hard fans of Star Wars and many would feel that Family Guy had ruined or belittled it. On the other hand, if you’ve never seen Star Wars before, you will in no way find many of the jokes funny and will find the plot confusing and hard to understand most of the time. I am familiar with the film so understand what a lot of the jokes were referencing but if I wasn’t, I doubt that I would have laughed more than once or twice during the whole thing. Secondly, although this version wasn’t poor it definitely felt like it lacked something. It seemed to be fairly half-arsed and more like the Family Guy creators would find this an entertaining project to do for themselves, rather than trying to make it excellent viewing. To their credit they did make the effort to make many of the scenes look the same as the sets in the real film which made it more true to the original Star Wars, but then I doubt I would have noticed if they hadn’t.

I find it hard to say too much more about Blue Harvest, as I didn’t hate it but I wasn’t mad on it either, which is what I was expecting to happen before I watched it. Yes, Brian looked pretty good as Chewbacca and Meg’s brief appearance was entertaining, but I found myself missing R2D2’s cute droid noises when hearing Cleveland as R2D2 speaking. As was mentioned at the end of this DVD, this Star Wars parody came out only a few months after Robot Chicken did it, and I can’t help but think that they probably did it a lot better. I imagine that Robot Chicken creator Seth Green (who plays Chris in Family Guy) would have been quite annoyed that although they did it first and in fact got George Lucas and Mark Hammel on board, Family Guy’s rendition was more famous and popular simply because the latter is better known as a cartoon and had more of a fan base.

Anyway, in conclusion, I couldnt say that I recommend Blue Harvest for the simple reason that it was no where near as good as the original Star Wars film, nor was it as good as a traditional Family Guy episode. Since it was poorer than both of the things it amalgemated, maybe they should have just let both be.

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