Blue Harvest (Family Guy)
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 "Now This Is An Amazing Parody"
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Blue Harvest is the hour-long premiere of the sixth season of the American animated television series, Family Guy, and the first part of the series' Laugh It Up, Fuzzball trilogy. It originally aired on Fox in the United States on September 23, 2007. The episode is a retelling and parody of the 1977 blockbuster film, Star Wars, recasting the show's characters into Star Wars roles.
Plot
While the Griffins are watching television, the power goes out and they are left with no other form of entertainment. While they wait for the power to return, Peter decides to retell the story of Star Wars beginning with "Part IV".
Why It Rocks
- This episode has a very exciting story, with Peter telling his family their version of the story of Star Wars while the power is out at the Griffin house.
- Not only is this exciting, but it’s considered one of the funniest parodies of Family Guy.
- The show’s staff asked Lucasfilm for permission to make this episode, and they said yes, which is awesome.
- Alongside "Stewie Kills Lois and Lois Kills Stewie" (another Season 6 episode), it manages to have some of the best action scenes in Family Guy's entirety with the battles being exactly like Star Wars.
- The Family Guy characters taking the places of the Star Wars characters in the story was good and hilarious.
- The music is amazing and thrilling, having the same greatness as the Star Wars music.
- The ending was good for the Star Wars story, and after Peter finished telling the story, the power comes back on at the Griffin house.
- This started the Laugh It Up, Fuzzball: The Family Guy Trilogy on a high note.
- It also started season 6 on a high note as well.
Reception
In its original broadcast on September 23, 2007, "Blue Harvest" was viewed by 10.86 million viewers. The episode acquired a 5.5 Nielsen rating, the audience measurement systems developed to determine the audience size and composition of television programming in the United States, in the 18–49 demographic.
Reviews of this episode were generally positive. Common Sense Media gave the episode three out of five stars, calling it a "racy but often hilarious satire of fantasy favorite". Brad Trechak of TV Squad also praised "Blue Harvest", stating that it "was a fun episode to watch"; he thought that "MacFarlane kept to the story pretty well, and there were enough corny jokes to make it amusing". Ahsan Haque from IGN gave it a score of seven out of ten, criticizing the selection of Herbert as Obi-Wan, but did say that the other choices were "spot-on"; he ended his review by stating, "as a tribute to Star Wars, this episode succeeds, but you can't help but wish that there was a bit more to it, considering the nature of the source material". In a later review of the season as a whole, Haque said that the episode was "generally entertaining, but certainly wasn't as great as it could have been". In 2019, however, Jesse Schedeen, also from IGN, placed "Blue Harvest" as the second best episode in his list of the 20 best Family Guy episodes, to celebrate the show's 20th anniversary, stating that it "was Family Guy's first attempt at devoting an hour-length episode to lampooning the Star Wars franchise, and it remains the best." Daniel Fienberg of Zap2it also gave it a positive review although he stated that it was released soon after Robot Chicken's Star Wars special and it fared worse because of it. Tom Eames of entertainment website Digital Spy placed the episode at number three on his listing of the best Family Guy episodes in order of "yukyukyuks" and described the episode as "pretty much the same as its sequel but better."
Newsday's Diane Werts rendered a more mixed verdict, saying the episode "veers wildly from bull's-eye satire to gotta-fill-time-now exposition", and was not as enjoyable for non-Star Wars fans. Robin Pierson of The TV Critic also gave it a mixed review, criticizing the writers for using the character of Herbert and the episode's musical moment which he called an "un-amusing waste of time", although he did praise the way that the episode satirized the Star Wars universe; he ended his review by saying that "Chances are the more you like Star Wars, the more you will enjoy this. For those of us who know Family Guy better than Star Wars, there is plenty of bad material here to remind us that nothing much has changed". He gave the episode sixty-five out of a possible one-hundred.
The Parents Television Council, a group that has been a frequent critic of Family Guy, criticized the episode for a perceived frequent use of sexual dialogue, enough for the episode to have an "S" content descriptor for sexual content (the episode was rated TV-14-DLV on Fox).
In 2009, TV Guide ranked "Blue Harvest" #99 on its list of the 100 Greatest Episodes.
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