Typical. You wait ages for a decent Star Wars spoof, and then two come out at once. This year we’ve blessed with DVD releases for both Family Guy Blue Harvest and Robot Chicken Star Wars, and whether you prefer one to the other, you’d have to be seriously chortle-challenged not to love both.
Robot Chicken is the stop motion sketch with action figures for stars co-created by Seth Green (of Oz in Buffy fame). It caused an internet buzz when a sketch featuring Palpatine taking a phone call from Darth Vader after the destruction of the Death Star became a YouTube hit. It was that sketch which also lead to Lucasfilm agreeing to let the Robot Chicken team produce a 22-minute Star Wars special. It was such a success, there’s now a second one on the way, to be broadcast in the States in November. And Seth Green got on the blower to SFX to give a few more details about the follow-up.
“The second special is completely different iteration,” says Green. “With the first special it was all the geeky chats that nerds have been having for the last 25 years about Star Wars made in sketch form. With the second one we have a little bit more of an opportunity to tell a story. We saw what we were capable of in the first one, and we really wanted to improve upon it. I’ve always been by the bounty hunters in The Empire Strikes Back, that tableaux of six guys on the Executor where Boba Fett comes from. Who are those guys and how did they get there? Did they have agents? Did they know each other? Did they answer an ad? Are they in competition? Do they hate eah other? What kind of traps did the other guys set? And how did they feel when Boba Fett won? So that’s the throughline we’ve got on the second special. But that’s intercut with several channel flips of different moments from all around the time line and all around the movies.”
Robot Chicken Star Wars is out on DVD now for £12.99. Honestly, you’ll love it.
