Blu-ray Box Set Review: 'Laugh It Up, Fuzzball!'

-



Laugh It Up, Fuzzball: The Family Guy Trilogy

Directed by Dominic Polcino and Peter Shin

Written by Alec Sulkin, Kirker Butler, Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and David A. Goodman
Based on the Star Wars Trilogy created by George Lucas

Reviewer’s Note: This article is a review of the box set and its features.

Peter Griffin (as Han Solo) Look, we got four or five of the main characters on this ship. I think we'll be fine.

The Trilogy

Seth McFarlane’s long-running (and twice canceled) Fox animated series Family Guy  has lampooned the Star Wars franchise many times since its 1999 premiere. In most cases, McFarlane and his writing staff have added many quick Star Wars-related gags to the satirical misadventures of the Griffin family (voiced by McFarlane, Alex Borstein, Mila Kunis, and Seth Green) and the cast of supporting characters.

In addition to visual references and adaptations of Star Wars quotes such as “Lois, if you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine,”  Family Guy’s creative team produced three double-length episodes which spoof the original Star Wars Trilogy.


The resulting Family Guy Trilogy consists of:

  • Blue Harvest (2007), a 48-minute-long parody of Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope (1977)
  • Something, Something, Something Dark Side (2009), a 44-minute-long parody of Star Wars - Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
  • It’s a Trap! (2010), a 56-minute-long parody of Star Wars - Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (1983)



[as Han is about to be frozen in carbonite]
Leia: I love you.
Han: F--k off.

McFarlane’s Fuzzy Doors Productions made two versions of each episode. The DVD/Blu-ray version has adult language and sexual innuendos; the version shown on Fox Television retains most of the ribald humor but omits the profanity and racier content.

The Box Set

In December 2010, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment released Laugh It Up, Fuzzball: The Family Guy Trilogy, a four-disc box set available in Blu-ray and DVD formats.  (The box set’s title is derived from a line of dialogue  in The Empire Strikes Back.)

The design for the slipcover packaging is a tongue-in-cheek parody of 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment’s original DVD box set of The Star Wars Trilogy (2004).

The layout of the Laugh It Up, Fuzzball set’s cover closely resembles that of Lucasfilm’s first DVD release of Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi. The front cover shows Luke Skywalker (Chris Griffin), Princess Leia (Lois Griffin), Han Solo (Peter Griffin), Chewbacca (Brian Griffin), R2-D2 (Cleveland), and C-3PO (Quagmire), as well as three X-Wing fighters and the Death Star.

The back cover depicts Stewie Griffin as the evil Lord Darth Vader, arms akimbo and glowering as menacingly as a Family Guy character can glower.

The Blu-ray jewel boxes which contain the individual episodes come in the package’s inner box. This box has a full color drawing of the Family Guy versions of Han, Leia, Chewbacca, and C-3PO in the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon and the Look, we got four or five of the main characters on this ship. I think we'll be fine quote.

The cases for Blue Harvest, Something, Something, Something Dark Side, and It’s a Trap! feature cover art based on the original movie posters by artists Tom Jung and Roger Kastel. Though the artwork is tweaked in Family Guy style, it also replicates the classic Star Wars posters’ designs and fonts.

Though Blue Harvest and Something, Something, Something Dark Side are one-disc sets, It’s a Trap!  comes with a DVD/digital copy disc. It’s a Trap! also differs from the earlier releases because its Blu-ray disc is region-specific, while Blue Harvest and Something, Something, Something Dark Side are on region-free discs.

My Take

Stewie Griffin as Darth Vader: Give yourself to the dark side, Luke.
Chris Griffin as Luke Skywalker: I will not fight you.
Stewie Griffin as Darth Vader: Well, all right. I guess that's no problem. I can always get Seth Green to fight me. He'll do anything for money. I mean, did you see Sex Drive? Oh, of course you didn't. You're a person

Laugh It Up, Fuzzball: The Family Guy Trilogy is a nice box set to own if you are:

  • a Family Guy fan
  • a Star Wars fan with a sense of humor
  • a Family Guy and Star Wars fan with a sense of humor
  • an adult viewer who can watch animated programs that contain profanity and off-color jokes

McFarlane and his writers love Star Wars, but they fearlessly poke fun at the characters, situations, and  the movies’ inevitable off-moments.

Peter (Han Solo): We'll be safe enough once we make the jump to hyperspace. Besides, I know a few maneuvers. We'll lose'em.
[the Falcon starts listing lazily to the left]
Chris (Luke Skywalker): Uh, that was your maneuver? Moving slightly to the left?
Peter (Han Solo): Well, I mean we're not in the same place we were, huh? That ought to confuse 'em.
Chris (Luke Skywalker): Yeah, but you hardly did anything. You just started listing lazily to the left. I'm pretty sure they can keep up.
Imperial Officer 1: Where did they go?
Imperial Officer 2: There they are! They're listing lazily to the left. Go left, left!
Imperial Officer 1: Boy, this guy knows some maneuvers.
As is usually the case with movie parodies, the humor is hit-or-miss in The Family Guy trilogy. Some of the gags are wickedly funny, especially the ones that poke fun at the movies’ plot holes and contradictions.

Other sequences, such as the “couch joke” in Blue Harvest and the repetitive “exchange of glances at the Pit of Carkoon” bit in It’s a Trap! don’t work as well.

Overall, Laugh It Up, Fuzzball: The Family Guy Trilogy  is a good set for fans of Seth McFarlane’s  often ribald riffs on American pop culture.  It’s also intended to please those Star Wars fans who can take the parodies’ jokes about the Original Trilogy without feeling insulted.

Blu-ray Specifications


Video
  • Codec: MPEG-4 AVC
  • Resolution: 1080p
  • Aspect ratio: see individual releases
  • Original aspect ratio: see individual releases

Audio
  • English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
  • Spanish: Dolby Digital 5.1
  • French: DTS 5.1
  • German: DTS 5.1
  • Italian: DTS 5.1
  • Catalan: DTS 5.1

Subtitles
English SDH, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Italian, Norwegian, Swedish
English SDH, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, Finnish, Mandarin (Simplified), Mandarin (Traditional), Norwegian, Swedish
English SDH, French, Spanish
Discs
  • 50GB Blu-ray Disc
  • Six-disc set (3 BDs, 3 DVDs)
  • Digital copy (on disc)
  • DVD copy
  • BD-Live

Packaging
Slipcover in original pressing

Playback
Region A
Miscellaneous
  • Number of discs: 3
  • Rated: NR (Not Rated)
  • Studio: 20th Century Fox
  • DVD Release Date: December 21, 2010
  • Run Time: 143 minutes

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How many movies have been made based on Stephen King's 'It'?

-
Image
How many movies have been made based on Stephen King's It ? It  has been adapted twice for filmed audio-visual media. The first filmed version of  It was a TV limited series; the second was a duology of theatrically-released movies.  The first adaptation of Stephen King’s 1986 doorstop of a novel was a 1990 adaptation made as a two-part ABC miniseries for television. Among the cast members: Tim Reid, Harry Anderson, Annette O’Toole, John Ritter, and Richard Thomas. The miniseries also featured Tim Curry as the evil Pennywise the Clown. Adapted for television by director Tommy Lee Wallace and Lawrence D. Cohen (who also adapted King’s  Carrie  for director Brian De Palma in 1976),  It  was okay but a watered-down take on the scary novel about a group of friends who must face off against a monstrous entity known as “It” twice. Once as kids in 1960, then again as adults in 1990. (Like  11,22.63,  the TV version of It avoids the year 1958, which is where parts of  11/22/63 
Read more

Talking About 'Band of Brothers' (HBO Miniseries): Why were there no black soldiers in the Band of Brothers TV miniseries?

-
Image
Band of Brothers,  sadly, reflects one of the sad realities of American society in the 1940s - racial segregation in the armed forces. Although there  were  a few all-Negro (as blacks were referred to in those days) units in the U.S. Army and the Army Air Forces that served with distinction in the European Theater of Operations, most black servicemen were assigned to non-combat units in Supply of Services and other support forces. Most of these soldiers were truck drivers, anti-aircraft gunners, barrage balloon handlers, engineers, stevedores, clerks, cooks, corpsmen, and so on. Only late in the war (fall of 1944 and winter/spring 1945) did large numbers of black infantrymen see combat against German forces, and even then they served in all-black units commanded by white officers. © 2001 Home Box Office, Dreamworks SKG, and Play-Tone Pictures The 101st Airborne Division was an all-American unit made up of individuals from many different groups - Easy Company’s first C.O.,
Read more

Bolero: The One Movie I Have Seen That I Wish Could Be Erased From My Memory

-
Image
If you could have 1 movie that you’ve seen in the past erased from your memory, what movie would that be and why? That’s easy.  Bolero. © 1984 Cannon Film Group Now, I have seen more than my fair share of movies that, for one reason or another, I don’t enjoy at all or once liked but have changed my mind about as I have grown older.  Me Before You  is an example of the former;  Avatar  and  Midway  are exemplars of the latter. But writer-director John Derek’s softcore porn movie disguised as an “adventure in ecstasy” is still the dumbest, most boring film I ever paid a movie ticket to go see in an actual multiplex. It’s so bad, in fact, that my friends (yes, I went with a coed group of buds from college) and I decided, collectively, that as spectacular as Bo Derek looks naked, she was way too old to play a nubile if naive girl in her 20s. The story was just a barely-there plot woven together around a series of nude scenes (including the obligatory girl-girl scene) that
Read more