Monday, April 11, 2022

DVD Review: Family Guy: It's a Trap!

 


It's a trap is pretty much what you would think it is. Partly an homage to Star Wars, and partly a spoof. Seth McFarlane and Seth Green are huge fans of Star Wars (Green often spoofs Star Wars on his show Robot Chicken), which probably helped get Fox's permission and Lucasfilm's blessing to do spoof Star Wars. It began with the wildly popular Blue Harvest, then the follow-up with Something, Something Dark Side, which spoofed A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back Respectively. This one, as you can tell from the cover, spoofs Return of the Jedi. There is a pretty good joke at the beginning that they are just doing this one to cash in and declare in the opening crawl that Fox made them do this one. Like the other ones, this is basically a longer version of a Family Guy episode, and because it is on DVD, you get uncensored jokes. Some of the jokes are pretty cringe-worthy and fall flat, while others work pretty well. It is a very mixed bag. It also does not help that this spoofs the movie that is pretty much universally considered the weakest of the original movies.

For those who get the DVD, the extras include a commentary track on the movie with Seth MacFarlane, writers David A. Goodman, Cherry Chevapravatdumrong, Shannon Smith, and director Peter Shin. Then there is a "Special Message from Darth Stewie, that is just a random joke as a separate extra, a Star Wars Trivial Pursuit that is basically the writers answering Star Wars questions for a half an hour, and a twenty-minute feature on drawing the characters, a short outtakes clip, an animatic version of the show, and a making the scene feature in which the director explains on the evolution of a couple of different scenes from the animatic version to what ends up in the final product. So, there is a lot of bonus material for those who want to watch it.

Overall, it just seemed like this had to be made because they had spoofed the other two movies, not because anyone involved in the process actually wanted to do this one. That definitely comes through in the final product as it is not nearly as good as the first two, but then again neither was the source material. As I said above, some of the jokes were good and some fell flat, which really made for an inconsistent final product. But, if you are a fan of Family Guy and have the other DVDs, you probably will want this to keep your collection complete.

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