DVD Review: Family Guy - Something, Something, Something, Dark Side
Something, Something Something, Dark Side... holy crap, both my wife and I busted out laughing at that title. And thankfully the laughs continued after actually putting the DVD in the player. If you enjoyed the Family Guy's parody of Star Wars, you are absolutely going to love this next installment where they tackle the following movie in the saga, The Empire Strikes Back. Typically it's a bad sign when a movie goes straight to DVD... in this case, however, going straight to DVD means you get to see it uncut with no commercials and uncensored with all the naughty language in tact.
Once again the power goes out in the Griffin household, so Peter spins a yarn about what happens after the events of his previous Star Wars tale. Peter takes the role of Han Solo, Chris becomes Luke Skywalker, Lois is Princess Leia, Brian morphs into a short Chewbacca, Quagmire shows up as C3PO, and Cleveland takes on R2D2. The other roles are also played by various Family Guy characters, but I don't think there's any real need to mention them all... except for the Giant Chicken, who plays Boba Fett.
The movie lasts about an hour, yet amazingly the story follows remarkably close to the original Empire Strikes Back, which makes if feel like a full-length feature. Plus, it's loaded with jokes of all shapes and sizes. Some poke fun at the original movie, some poke fun at the Family Guy series, some poke fun at other films, and some are just the completely random jokes we know from the series. There are a few jokes in there that don't really work, but most of them do on some level, and many on multiple levels. We basically found ourselves laughing out loud a lot, which is pretty rare.
The artwork is the familiar Family Guy style, but then also has the feel of the real Star Wars universe, and like the series some things are done in 3D... that's 3D computer graphics, not the 3D where you wear the stupid looking glasses and the picture tries but usually fails to come out of the screen. Mostly it's the spaceships and AT-ATs and stuff like that, and it really helps to give the film an epic sci-fi feel. Oh, and the music and sound effects come straight from the Star Wars movies, so that helps immerse you into the universe even more.
There is a feature length commentary with a whole bunch of people, including Seth MacFarlane and Seth Green, but I haven't had a chance to listen to it yet. Also, there are pop-up facts which you can enable, but again I have not yet had time to try them out. The one extra that I did have time to watch was a filming of the complete table read for the movie. This is when everybody involved sits around a giant table and reads through the script to see how it's all playing. This was cool because it gave many jokes that didn't make it into the final version, however it was also kind of annoying because it was really hard to hear. There was one camera set up in the corner to record the thing, and I believe they just used the camera's mic, so you had to turn it up real loud to hear what they were saying, but then quickly turn it down whenever the crowd of people laughed... which was quite often.
There was also a sneak-peak table read for the next episode which parodies Return of the Jedi, but I didn't want to watch that because I'm not really a big fan of sneak peaks. I like to wait until something is finished and take it in like it is meant to be experienced. But anyway, this is a great DVD, very funny, and I would highly recommend it.
