Family Guy: Something Something Something Dark Side

I'm torn on Family Guy.  When it first came out in 1999, I thought it was freaking outrageous.  When it came back in 2006, it made those older episodes look completely tame.  The new episodes are even more irreverent, push more boundaries, and the stories are more ridiculous in a good way.  Yet, unlike say The Simpsons or South Park, this sort of impudence is becoming stale.  I'm not as exctied to see the re-runs as I once was, the jokes don't seem to hold the same fun the second time through -- sort of like hearing the same noc-noc joke again.

I think this might be the case Family Guy's second Star Wars spoof, Something Something Something Dark Side.  The characters you know and love -- Joe, Mort, that dude you know is gay but they don't really come out and say it but he says "I knooooow", the Evil Monkey -- all make an appearance as characters from The Empire Strikes Back.  Meg is the giant space worm (in Blue Harvest she was the garbage worm).


I guess the thing that I liked most about Family Guy is that they kept introducing random characters, like greased up deaf guy or even Evil Monkey.  That's what made it so random.  Perhaps now that they're not random, now that I know that the "I knoooooow" guy has a boyfriend and a judgmental father, I'm finding less humor in the series.  For my money, the retarded horse is hi-fucking-larious.  Also, the Rooster that is Peter's mortal enemy.  So, when I see the Rooster show up in the actual show, I clap my hands and laugh and say "yaaaaaa! Chik'n" but when he shows up as Boba Fett in Something Something, I stifle a chuckle, but I'm not as giddy (Funnily enough [is funnily a word?], FG:SSSDS references this phenomenon when Peter as Han Solo sees the Rooster as Boba Fett and says, "Ha.  The Rooster's Boba Fett.").

The commentary about the plot holes and goofy weird inconsistencies of George Lucas's classic triology is the most appreciable thing about these spoofs that Seth MacFarlane and crew are putting on.  Why is Lando wearing Han's clothes after Han gets frozen at Cloud City?  And what exactly did Luke cutting off the head of fake Darth Vader on Dagoba really mean/prove/do for the story other than confuse the hell out of everyone.

Criticisms aside, the video is truly a good thing.  Cookie Monster, our favorite asperger sufferer with the fiends for baked sweets, is the Hoth Beast (awesome), and there's a great montage that splices Chris as Luke working out to become  a Jedi on Dagoba with Dolph Lundgren as Ivan Drago working out to beat up Rocky.  Oh, and the Darth fart, which cannot be described in this medium.