![]() It's a brand of humour that, alas, escapes me completely. "A long time ago, but somehow in the future"-so begins a string of dry asides that mock every improbable occurrence in the film. And in trying to please not only the thoughtless point-and-laugh sensibilities of its core audience but also the excessively analytical sensibilities of Star Wars geeks, "Blue Harvest" only ends up exposing the essential ugliness of both. But first and foremost, Star Wars is the entry point for "Blue Harvest" ( Jedi's own fake production title)-a forty-five-minute retelling of the original film starring Chris (voiced by Seth Green) as Luke, Peter (Seth MacFarlane) as Han Solo, Lois (Alex Borstein) as Leia, Stewie (MacFarlane) as Darth Vader, and so on and so forth. Ergo, once the fanbase had successfully rescued the series from premature cancellation, Seth MacFarlane and his crew became lazy, too often resorting to facile name-dropping.Īs the show's sixth-season premiere, "Blue Harvest" is undoubtedly a modern-day "Family Guy" episode, chock full of jokes that are either self-contained history lessons explained to the point of redundancy ("Thanks for the sex, early-nineties printer") or media artifacts, recreated verbatim and orchestrated as distracting non sequiturs (like an uninterrupted chunk of the opening sequence from Tom Baker-era "Doctor Who"). Though the show brilliantly attacked social mores and narrative conventions, we were more impressed by its far-reaching knowledge of pop culture-mostly the kind of stuff we had only seen on Nick at Nite and the Internet-than by any of the subversive material therein. It's a poisonous mentality, this vicarious sense of entertainment, and its infiltration of my generation is manifested in our exaltation of "Family Guy". I bore witness to a hundred "I am your father" jokes before any formal viewing of The Empire Strikes Back, and so, like other movie references I was not yet intellectually mature enough to piece together on my own (Rosebud is a sled, the Planet of the Apes is really Earth), I was more apt to laugh because the television kept telling me to laugh. ![]() ![]() By Ian Pugh Born the year after Return of the Jedi came out, I was left in limbo as far as the behemoth of popular culture that is Star Wars was concerned: too young to have seen the films when they exploded into the public consciousness, I was also a little too old to experience a religious awakening with their "Special Edition" revivals in the late-Nineties. ![]()
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