DVD Review: Family Guy’s Something, Something, Something Dark Side (DVD)

By Kevin Coll • December 29, 2009 • 1 Comment

The long awaited sequel to Family Guy’s first Star Wars parody, Blue Harvest, has finally arrived on DVD and Blu-ray. Something, Something Dark Side, is the crew’s hilarious redux of Empire Strikes Back. First off I must point out the show wastes no time in giving some kind of pop culture reference to insult or make you smile. While watching Aaron Sorkin’s new show “The Kitchen” featuring people walking and talking intelligently throughout a kitchen, The Griffin’s are struck with another power outage leaving Peter with one thing to do, tell the next story in the original Star Wars trilogy.

Assuming that the viewer is already familiar with the film’s plot, the opening crawl instead goes into detail about how 20th Century Fox made Star Wars unprofitable (foreseeing it a failure) to other companies by letting George Lucas keep all merchandising rights to it and purposefully wastes $58,000 on animating a computer-generated cartoon elephant, which dances across the screen mid-text.

The parody really accurately portrays the story of Empire very well using a lot of the familiar ship shots, camera angles and other areas of notability. The spoofs are a lot funnier and no joke is recycled from the previous version. Whats tragic about the movie is that it points out and sort of skewars the original film’s “greatness” with lots of pointed out flaws and other issues it contained. I love one of the jokes pointed out such as there are infinite directions they could head when fleeing Hoth, but the rebels head right for the Imperial fleet. I also love the playful shots at Seth Green, who once again points out (as Chris Griffin) that his Robot Chicken has done a parody already. Lastly, the continuous abuse of Meg showing up in the stories as creatures from the film are just laugh out loud funny.

As I mentioned earlier the ships, planets and some of the other fantastic elements were all digitally created and based on the original models making you wonder if the Lucas camp was involved in some way. The results are pretty impressive, you notice the depth and definition right away. As for the hand-drawn animation, it’s smooth, crisp and very colorful.

Extras and Packaging

This two-disc set includes a digital copy of the film for downloading to a media player. The other disc includes the film and all of the special features. The full list of extras includes:

- Commentary by Executive Producers Seth MacFarlane, Mark Hentemann and David A. Goodman, Writer Kirker Butler, Director Dominic Polcino and Actor Seth Green

- Family Guy Fact-Ups

- The Dark Side of Poster Art

- Animatic Scene-to-Sceen with Commentary by Director Dominic Polcino

- Family Guy: Something, Something, Something Dark Side Table Read

- Sneak Peek of Family Guy — Episode VI: We Have a Bad Feeling About This Table Read

To Conclude, Family Guy has a great fan following and many of them happen to also be fans of the original Star Wars trilogy (like myself). This film was made for people like us and MacFarlane and co show they are true fans as well. If you already have Blue Harvest, then you should definitely consider adding this worthy follow-up to your collection.

Buy!

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