A long time ago, "Family Guy Blue Harvest" was the second Lucas-sanctioned suck-job to show up inside of a couple of months that played around with the "Star Wars" universe. And it remains the far, far worse of the two. It is such a self-involved piece of Banthaa shit that it comes off as something made by a guy who crops out the women in his home sex tapes before sending copies to his buddies. Watching it, I felt stuck in a tractor beam of anticipation... waiting on something, anything, funny enough to have warranted a one-hour FG episode, much less a full-on recreation of the White Whale of pop-culture, aka "the most famous movie on earth not shot by a guy named Zapruder".

No dice. The force had left the building.

Not that you'd know it from the special features section of the DVD. Interviews with guys who write fan-novels about Leia's abhorrent attraction to Jawas and who would tell you that your grasp of Alderaanian is only passable, so, uh... no, you can't come to the convention in their land speeder (i.e. the FG crew), are about as enlightening as a documentary on Iraq made by Saddam. These people are completely delusional. To hear them talk about it, you would think that McFarlane was attempting cold fusion. "I heard rumors, but I didn't believe them. But then I saw some doodles of a fat Han and then I thought to myself 'OMIGOD, Seth! Is he really gonna DO this?!?!'" Short answer: If by "this" you mean "jack shit", then, yes, he is.

To wit: Peter (we all know these New England scribbles by now, right?) is Solo, the wife is Leia, the fat kid, Luke, black dude is R2, pervert is 3-PO, baby is Vader, the fat sister (in a bit of "genius", say the FG crewmembers) is the line-less sewer monster, and the ancient pedophile is Obi Wan. The characters don't deviate from their usual form; and, for some reason, the original plot isn't altered much at all either. This is not surprising, since FGs comedy-by-numbers requires boundaries guarded by razor wire. Anyhow, the inside references suck (yeah, I know a parsec is a unit of distance) and the jokes are obvious in the extreme ("I made a Darth Doodie"). Note to Seth: when you've pulled together all of your enormous financial resources and can't get a laugh out of much more than a New-Jack version of R2-D2 pistol-whacking a tie-fighter, you are at your creativity's end. Oh, and then there's a music number taken in its entirety out of Dirty Dancing that exposes nicely FG's pornographic lack of comedic structure and nails the coffin shut on FGBH. For, without (or, because of) the word-for-word pop "reference" and, as even the idiots who write South Park noticed, the non-sequitor ("This is worse than that time Brad Pitt dressed me up like Angelina Jolie and shoved an African kid up my ass and then filmed it coming back out") the show is nothing. In the end, it doesn't matter how many times Seth tells us FG is a "celebration of pop culture"; what we're seeing in "Blue Harvest" is only a revelation of some man-child's death-grip on his own inflated memories of a very dull past. Or vice versa... I forget.

--michael3b