Family_Guy_Blue_Harvest_Directors_comment-25fps.srt (DOWNLOAD SUBTITLES)
Hey. This is Seth MacFarlane.
We're here with the DVD commentary for the Star Wars episode,
with a whole bunch of minutes of stuff you didn't see on TV.
- Here's executive producer David Goodman. - Hi, there.
- Writer Alec Sulkin. - Hello.
- Director Dominic Polcino. - Hi, there.
And over to my right is writer Danny Smith.
To infinity and beyond.
- Producer Kara Vallow. - Hello.
- And recording engineer Patrick Clark. - Hey, there.
So maybe talk about how this Star Wars episode came to be? Maybe a little of that?
Yeah. For those of you who haven't read it in any number of a million other places,
I'll tell it again.
We were doing so many Star Wars gags on the show
that it got to the point where Fox Legal said to us:
"If we keep doing this, we're gonna get sued, so check with Lucasfilm before you do this."
So we thought, "Shit. That's gonna be the end of it."
We went to Lucasfilm, and it turned out they were really nice, cool people.
So nice, in fact, that we said, "I wonder if they wouldn't mind if we did a full episode."
They agreed to let us take a whack at it,
and were pretty hands-off throughout.
- The rest is recent history. - Yeah.
Although many writers pitched Star Wars gags,
probably the writer who pitched the most Star Wars gags was Alec Sulkin.
So he seemed a natural... seemed a natural to write the script.
Originally, I told him it should be an hour-long episode, and he said:
"I don't wanna write an hour-long..."
No, watch The Making Of... You'll see the truth.
I have to take a lot of crap for this.
But David, I will say, is the reigning Star Wars trivia champion of the office.
We have a Trivial Pursuit Star Wars game here and David wins each time we play.
That one said "late at night". I swear on television it said "late-night".
- We fixed it. - Thank you.
I think Danny pitched that "I got back from hockey" line.
Ripped from the headlines of my own tragic life that was. My sad, sad...
Weren't you toying with making it a widescreen presentation?
We talked about it. I think it was the issue...
It would've been cool to look at, itjust wouldn't have been great for the comedy.
It's cool to look at anyway.
I think that 16x9 format is...
The only thing it's not gonna be good for is TV comedy, cos comedy is more...
It's more of an intimate genre, at its best, and you don't need all that extra space.
- This music, obviously, is right from... - Awesome.
...right from the movie, right? - Yeah.
That was the other thing that Lucas very, very graciously granted us,
was the right to use the actual score from the movie, and all of this is...
There are some edits, obviously, in the music,
but between Patrick Clark over here and our music editor Stan Jones
and our editor Mike Elias actually, you can't really hear 'em.
No.
Here's a new bit coming up.
Right there, that cue originally continued,
but we cut it off and put some artificial reverb in
so it sounded like the trombones stop.
It was actually kind of a fun challenge to make those music edits and make it seem...
You know, it seemed like the story was kind of almost built around the music layout.
Right there, that's another cut. Now, this music here...
That. They're little pieces that Walter Murphy did, just cos we needed them.
The bit about wondering if they're watching the right door was cut for time on television.
That's a new bit. Steve Callaghan is doing a voice now, and Alec, you're another one?
Who's the third voice? I don't remember.
- Seth. - Is that Seth?
Never heard of him.
This part always gets good laughs. This was pitched later on and always gets a laugh.
Everything's very accurate to the movie,
even those rings in the back - if you watch the movie, those things are there.
I would hope so.
Actually, the decision to make it an hour did come in later.
Alec wrote it as a half-hour, but he had a lot of extra material.
And so, over time, we kept having to add new gags...
- Like this one. ...because it was still short. That's right.
- You don't do the budget, Terry. I do. - His name's Terry.
Instantly funny.
Great shot there. Good job, Dom.
Yeah, I came up with that shot.
I read on the message boards that some people think
that there was rotoscoping of effects from the movie.
There's no rotoscoping in this, right?
We drew everything for the animatic.
That might be on the DVD - the animatic. But it's all pencilwork.
And then we did study the film, and we changed...
The spaceships are a lot more pudgy than the normal George Lucas designs.
But the timing is pretty similar.
But the amount of detail, the amount of drawing,
is unparalleled for any other work, even on this show.
That's interesting. Pudgy - like, thicker, or?
Just to fit our fatter characters. Like, the cockpits are a little more bubbly.
- Nice touch, adding that hat to R2-D2. - Yeah.
It's like he borrowed Meg's hat and stretched it over his head.
- I believe that's a do-rag. - A do-rag. Like Manny Ramirez.
I love that, right there - in that last shot.
You actually drew that end of the smooth part.
In the movie, they cut away because R2-D2 can't...
- Never could have managed it. - Can't navigate that sand.
We can do a lot of things that George Lucas never could.
Technology is so much more advanced now.
So this episode was screened for Lucas.
You guys were up there watching it with him. What was that like?
It was great. He laughed the whole way through. Even at the most offensive stuff.
He never once groaned. He never once turned and gave me any kind of snippy...
"Come on" kind of look.
By that point in the weekend, we'd figured out that he's a cool guy, so it wasn't too stressful.
But it was still nice to hear him chuckling at a lot of this stuff.
It's true that we worked on this for over a year,
and George Lucas had never seen it until the weekend before it aired on TV.
So we were all a bit worried. Or at least I was.
His son is a big Family Guy fan, so...
Lucas said in the interview, which might be on the DVD,
that their TiVo was filled with Family Guy episodes, which was amazing to hear.
This is the voice of writer Alec Sulkin coming out of this guy.
Wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't ask: What's the.01?
Well, I mean, there's this little hole - it was kind of...
- This was also a gag that was added later. - Yeah.
We went through the movie and said:
"What spots hadn't we addressed in the first draft?" It's a great bit.
- The hole's only two metres across. - That's no bigger than a womp rat.
Exactly.
So you guys went up to that Star Wars ranch, right? I didn't get to go.
- Look, he's talking out the side of his mouth. - I'm sharing a mic with Kara.
You'll think this is a bullshit question, but you found Lucas was a great guy.
Everybody has an affinity for Star Wars. So you weren't disappointed?
- No, he was awesome. He was great. - It was like meeting Willy Wonka.
It's a beautiful place. It has Ferris wheels and, you know...
- Every room is filled with toys. - Ponies.
You take whatever you see. You see a Yoda doll, you take it.
He wasn't crazy and unpredictable and dangerously insane like Willy Wonka.
- But otherwise, it was like meeting Wonka. - No one was blown out into a swamp.
There were no child deaths.
If we touched the wrong thing, we could get ejected.
That's great. This is less about our show,
but I once met Derek Sanderson, one of my favourite hockey players,
and the guy was a complete fucking tool.
So good for you guys that you had a better experience.
I had this printer in the early '90s.
- Now, this... - This was one part where...
Lucas corporation had very, very few notes for us and things they wanted to change,
and they were all little things that they thought would hurt the brand or whatnot,
but originally the Jawas were called Jewas - and that's why Mort is one of them.
- This is actually... - Wasn't the line:
"Tell the Jewas they can't use our bathroom"?
Yeah.
- Shut up-a with the noise-a. - Shut up-a...
- But it's all right to make fun of Italians. - No problem there.
Even though they built half of New York for us.
This is awesome. Wasn't there a story about the two sunsets? Somebody asked him...
On the interview on the DVD he talks about the importance of sunsets in his movies -
at the end of THX, and in here, and...
George says it better than I ever could.
When I usually go through the first assembly of the show,
I've gotten into a rhythm of guessing as to what the timings should be.
This was one episode where it was very unpredictable
because you had this long pause when Chris walks out and sees the two suns,
and just trying to guess as to how that would be different in this situation.
Somebody asked, when we screened it at Lucasfilm:
"Did the London Symphony Orchestra record The People's Court theme for this?"
Seth pointed out that it was just from... from wherever we got the recording.
Thatjoke was changed. It was supposed to be...
- 1941. The theme from 1941. - Yeah.
1941. Or it was the theme of 60 Minutes or something.
John Williams actually did write...
- No, no, no, NBC... - It was the NBC... Yeah.
We couldn't clear it.
This is Danny Smith's voice.
This is a reference to a scene from Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story-
the DVD movie with a similar theme.
... Advertising Droids Emporium. Due to a garbled subspace...
- How many takes did you have to do on that? - Kara, I'm a one-shot, one-take guy.
He does one or two and then he nails it,
but then he does another six cos he thinks he's screwed up cos he's horribly insecure.
I am.
We dim the lights in the recording booth, Danny takes his shirt off,
and he'll get right up to the mic and start howling it. It's his process.
It's a bit of an homage to Dan Aykroyd and Gilbert and Sullivan patter songs
that I used to have to learn in high school.
What the "Phantom Menace" is that guy's problem?
One of two Phantom Menace gags in this one.
Now, this is Rush Limbaugh, doing his own voice.
It's funny how we found things that contour to Rush Limbaugh's point of view
- in the Star Wars universe. - Yeah.
Did we rewrite something? Did we do another gag that didn't do well?
- "General Poopatine" or something. - Didn't have as strong a punch.
He was astonishingly nice, Rush Limbaugh.
I disagree with everything he says, of course, but he was...
It's almost like he's playing a Republican character for money.
Yeah, cos he's actually a very, very nice, really good-natured guy.
So maybe you're right.
Whatever station he was broadcasting from,
you know it's on the hotel room television when Darth Vader comes in the room.
It's definitely Empire-endorsed.
Now, we'd done already a gag about the Sand People choir, right?
So we had to figure out a way to make it different by making it Opie.
My kids pointed out that Opie is a lot like those Sand People.
They thought that was really dead-on. Excellent casting.
We've used computer-generated animation before on the show,
but nothing anywhere approaching this.
In almost every scene, there is some kind of CG.
Every time you see R2-D2, he's computer-generated - he's not drawn.
It made sense to do that for him, cos there's so much detail on his body.
To expect somebody to draw that every time he turns...
Dom just wants to check out early.
If I could only CG all the characters, it would make my life easier.
Yes, it should all be done for you, Dom.
Dom, did you make any choices of sticking to the original version
or doing the new version for certain scenes?
I wanted to do the original version beginning to end,
but then every once in a while there was something that required a special shot,
or there was a note from Seth -
maybe because he's younger than I am.
He remembers the newer versions.
There were certain shots in the special edition of the original that I thought -
also, with our CG and the technology that we have -
it might be kind of cool to duplicate in animation.
The Millennium Falcon taking off was a great shot.
Yeah. But then the final battle, with all the X-wing fighters,
we tried to stick to the original because that's pretty iconic and memorable.
You guys are just old enough to have seen this on the big screen when it came out,
but I wonder how many kids who watch our show have ever seen it in a movie theatre.
I thought you were younger than me.
- Me? - No, Dom.
No.
- We're not gonna talk about our ages? - I'm 53.
When Star Wars came out, I went to the Apple Valley Mall with my friends,
and we snuck 12 beers in, in our coats,
and honestly, I don't remember most of Star Wars.
- I never got what the big deal was. - And you were only ten.
I was.
I kind of discovered it after the fact.
It was the 20-year reunion shows that came out, what, '97?
- Right. - What is that? Underneath the...
Yeah. That's some smudge on the cels.
- But that's deliberate, right? - We tried to fix that, but...
But that's deliberate, isn't it? To make it look like the...
- Yeah. - It was deliberate.
- It was, but I... - That shot is not in the...
- No, that's the original. - This is not in the broadcast show.
But the smudge under the... I don't know what optical effect causes that distortion,
but you see that in the movie,
and even that was duplicated deliberately in the animation, which was kinda cool.
Yeah, we tried to actually recreate all the flaws in the original.
There is no flaws.
In LA, it's hard to get into a club if you don't have chicks in your group.
Or unless you're with Seth.
Some interesting characters in the bar that we added.
Bender from Futurama in the background. The guy from Home Movies, Coach McGuirk.
None more interesting than that guy there.
That was Dom Polcino. I wonder if we'll see him again in the bar.
- No, he wouldn't do that. - This little bit is great, here.
Originally, this guy was called Scrotum Mouth.
I'm Pignose, and this is my brother-in-law, Scott. He's visiting from Hoth.
- I don't know why they call it Hoth... - That's John Viener doing that guy.
The lip-assignment timing on that guy's ball-face is awesome.
Alec Sulkin, leader of the band. Very funny joke.
- It's like they kept playing that song, right? - Absolutely.
But this also was not on the broadcast version. This is new.
This door is locked. Move on to the next one.
Maybe they're behind this door.
The fun of writing this episode was pointing out some of the flaws in logic in the script.
Whoever's in there won't be getting this giant cheque from Publisher's Clearing House.
- Publisher's Clearing House? - Shut up.
- Hear something? - I heard voices, but they stopped,
so I'm gonna assume there's no one in there.
There are a few lapses in logic.
There's Peter, for the first time. We didn't even miss him yet.
That's how good this has been.
I'm Han Solo, captain of the "Millennium Falcon",
and the only actor whose career isn't destroyed by this movie.
George Lucas laughed at that. He did.
- Mark Hamill did not like that. - Really?
How did we hear that?
- Linda called him... - Our casting director, Linda.
...and Carrie Fisher about doing some commentary on this,
and he said he was offended by that line.
He came by to tell us, but he couldn't get in downstairs.
Did he give any evidence to the contrary?
- But she wasn't pissed? - No.
- There's Dom again. - Is he talking to Death?
I hope it doesn't go off the screen quickly, so I can get a good look at it.
- Good, it's on. - I'm not responsible for that shot.
- I don't know what happened there. - The buck stops here.
Good, there he is again.
Notice Peter shoots first.
Yes, Peter shoots first.
Everyone had a huge problem with that in the special edition. What was the big deal?
I think it was that George Lucas wanted to make Han Solo more of a good-guy character.
- Like, he wouldn't shoot first. - He wouldn't murder somebody.
- I think we could have used... - It's interesting.
It's kind of symbolic of America then and America now, today.
Wait a minute, that's not right. It's the reverse. Forget what I just said.
Again, coming up, a comment on the limits of special-effects technology in the '70s movie -
talking about evasive action - "You're just moving a bit to the left?"
And again, just relying on incredibly detailed knowledge of the movie.
- Does anybody know what I'm talking about? - Yes. I just don't have detailed knowledge.
- Besides, I know a few manoeuvres. - This is it.
That's an actual line from the movie.
And that's a mirrored shot.
That was your manoeuvre - moving slightly to the left?
Well, we're not in the same place we were. That ought to confuse 'em.
The colours in this episode, too, are very, very...
Nobody does black like Family Guy.
Thanks to Kevin Hanley and the colour department. They outdid themselves.
- And everything has shadows. - Yeah.
Did he say "strap in" or "strap-on"?
Oh, Herbert.
Now this is a reference... I don't know that I hear a big laugh every time we screen this -
- to this Dr Who gag, which I love. - I love it, too.
- I am a big fan of the low per center. - That used to freak me out when I was a kid.
Cos it's not a show that, when you're a kid, does anything for you.
And it used to be on, like, after a nature show on PBS.
It's, like, bad, videotaped...
And still on the air in England. It's the longest-running science fiction show.
- There's a new version now. - In college, I tried to get into it and I couldn't.
I loved it in college.
- This wasn't in the TV version either. - Just a short version of it was.
Again, imitating shots from the movie.
- Are we coming up on? - We're coming up on the act break.
- So we'll be... - All those explosions were gen...
They look very true to the movie, but if you line 'em up against it, they're not the same.
Those were done by our overseas studio.
All right, so we now have two new folks in the room with us.
- We have assistant director Joseph Lee. - Hello.
- And our fabulous editor Mike Elias. - Thank you.
And Mike has edited just about every show you've ever watched,
- all the way back to the A- Team. - Wow.
Didn't you do The Greatest American Hero, too?
We're all walking on air with Mike Elias.
My son, when the guys said, "None of this will matter when we're famous singers,"
he said, "They're never gonna be famous singers cos they blow up on a Death Star."
You raised sensitive kids.
Maybe it was their off shift.
- Maybe. Let's hope so. - They were on weekend leave.
I know some guys who watched the show the night it premiered.
That was their favourite gag, and now I realise it's cos some of them are musicians.
That's so funny.
This scene was never funny the whole way until the very end, and now it's hilarious.
The additions and changes that were made at the end here made this very funny.
You mean, "That thing you just heard about"?
Mike also does a lot of literally individual frame work -
if a mouth shape is wrong when it comes back from overseas,
Mike will go in and replace it with the right one.
He has the ability to take a character out of a scene, or...
It's all pretty much invisible. If you're looking for it, you won't see it.
Mike's like a good referee in sports - you never notice the good ones.
Itjust all works out perfectly.
This thing, you might not be able to see - one guy puts his arm around the other.
It's very small.
"I'm working. Not here, not here."
- This looks beautiful. - This is where people were confused
that maybe we were painting over shots from the movie, but it's not.
- It's completely animated. - Not only shadows, but gradations too.
Yeah, the reflection in the floor there, it's awesome.
That level of detail is amazing.
- This was the last shot to go in. - Is that right?
Yes, this was hell getting in.
It's tough to get characters to move in rhythm with music, and we're buggy about that.
This is from The Blues Brothers - "Minnie the Moocher".
I thought it was great. I loved it.
Peter is wearing glasses in his stormtrooper outfit.
This next part was actually a scene that George Lucas had shot for his movie before...
Dom...
- We found that old footage and recreated it. - Dom, this is from Dirty Dancing.
That's right. Came out about the same year?
- Ten years later. - Joseph, is Dom cracking you up?
Don't let him give you that goddamn snippy Jewish business.
Not while the actual commentary is rolling.
- Save the anti-Semitic remarks for... - For the scripts.
This is the only episode of Family Guy that I've let my 11-year-old son, Jacob, watch.
- Wow. - Yeah.
- What else don't you let him do? - I don't let him have fun.
You think maybe it's time to let him out of the tent?
How about soda? Does he get soda?
I wanna take parenting hints from you. That's just what I wanna do.
- I don't wanna tell you how to raise kids... - He gets soda.
- Can he get sugar cereal? - He can.
Then let him watch Family Guy.
I don't wanna have to explain what a Cleveland steamer is.
- We never got that in. - No, that got in.
David, he'll get misinformed on the playground, don't worry.
Just make something up. It's the other kids who'll tell him.
You're right. I'll let the other kids parent him.
My kids will tell him.
- He's tickling him with the Force, right? - Yeah.
- Even that little thing is computer-generated. - Holy shit!
That obviously didn't make it on television.
Neither did this. I think this was...
These guys were the screaming black dolphins in "I Take Thee Quagmire".
"You know I gotjokes."
... Tyra Banks.
- Can you imagine? - Every night. Don't shake my hand.
These guys are very funny.
What did George Lucas say these little Tonka trucks were in Star Wars?
- What were those things? - We didn't get that far.
This was also a gag that was added late, right?
- Yeah. - Every time I watch this, I'm always...
If you really follow what they're saying, it makes no sense.
"So we're on the third level."
Hurry up, cos the smell of that Mrs. Fields is killing me.
- That's very funny. - This music is awesome.
- This took me three viewings before I got it. - Is that right?
It's the elevator bossa nova version of "The lmperial March".
Now, this gag coming up was not on TV, the stormtrooper church.
Yeah, I remember that.
We're having as much fun as you are, kids. We're rediscovering our own magic here.
I like to say that when I boarded this I was telling myself, "I am going to hell."
There's no hell. You'll be fine.
Maybe you were in hell.
Fouad.
A favourite among the writing staff.
- This was a character change, wasn't it? - Yes.
We can't tell you why.
This was Carl originally.
I like how he's still groaning while he's dying.
This episode in general is a tour de force for Mike Henry.
- He's got a lot of great stuff. - Mike Henry does Fouad.
The guy doing this voice is the same guy who sang "Earth Angel" in "Meet The Quagmires".
His name is Luke Adams.
Alec and I met him cos he was the karaoke deejay at this bar where we go.
Let's give the bar a shout-out. Actually, no, they'll all go there.
And then you'll never have a quiet night of karaoke.
- Well, no. We can tell them. - Yeah, sure.
It's the Brass Monkey in Los Angeles.
It's off of Wilshire Boulevard and Mariposa, which is one block east of Normandie.
I've asked a dozen times where you guys go, and you won't tell me,
but you'll tell anybody who buys this DVD.
That's kind of why Alec was trying to get him not to say it on the DVD.
But now, we're gonna get to hear David do some Billy Joel songs.
One of the edgiest things in this, and it's unintentionally edgy,
is that Luke and Leia, who in the first are sort of romantically inclined,
are mother and son in our version of Star Wars.
I'm stating the obvious.
- They're brother and sister. - But we don't know that.
It could've been awkward, but you didn't do the scene where they kiss before they swing...
Maybe we'll do that, if we do Empire.
- What? - They kiss in Empire.
- They do? - She kisses him in the bed.
I guess you don't know everything.
- I just thought of a funny pitch for that. - Good.
Lois could say, "I don't know what it is, but when I kiss you it's like kissing my brother."
- That's funny. - "Actually, that makes perfect sense."
"Luke, I hear you laid out Darth Vader."
"Luke, ever think of running for class president?"
They're really enjoying this.
- This changed a few times. - Yeah.
How you... how you doing right now?
The delivery here is reference to... I called Alec after I smoked some of his weed.
Hi, Mom and Dad. Thanks for listening.
They won't listen this far.
He came over to my house and he assured me it was, you know...
it was, you know, totally tame stuff.
Then he goes home, and I called him:
"Alec, how you... how you doing right now?" "I'm fine."
"Did you get home OK?" "Yeah."
"That's good. I don't... I don't think I'm doing so good."
Did you hide behind a chair as somebody delivered food?
Yeah. I was afraid to go get the cookies I had ordered from the grocery delivery service.
And then I thought that I had to keep my arms moving constantly,
because otherwise I would get paralysed.
So, yeah, thanks, Alec.
I hope that story stays on the commentary.
Does anybody remember who pitched the couch gag?
It's one of my favourite things in the show.
- You guys were in the room... - I thought it was Mark Hentemann.
It seemed very Mark Hentemann-heavy. Everyone seemed to jump in and build on it.
Cos there's something so familiar about...
How could all of us have had to move a couch at one time, but?
There's two boneheads moving a large piece of furniture,
and there's always one who decides he's got to be the one in charge of this hierarchy.
Yeah.
Also, what he's describing they're gonna do
doesn't look like it will help at all. Taking the legs off...
The door's too small. They gotta find another way...
On the occasions we've done the live shows and we've shown the clip of that scene,
the audience goes crazy for that.
Everyone has had to move a couch at one time.
Also, just the ridiculousness of them taking a couch from the Death Star seems...
Also, a great music cue from the original movie.
- You know that last drill we had? - There's Mike Henry again.
This is RJ. I don't know that we're gonna be seeing a lot of RJ.
He was a character that we invested a little bit in and doesn't seem to be paying off for us.
This cue starts as a cue from the movie
and then kind of blends into a Walter Murphy cue cos there wasn't enough of it.
When we screened the preview at Comic-Con,
this part with the sagging lightsaber got a laugh and also a gasp from the audience.
They just couldn't believe we were doing a lightsaber erection joke.
But didn't Spaceballs do that 50 years ago?
I guess people never get over their shock for that kind of stuff.
Nice little touch there - Darth checking the robe, just like in the movie.
- Just making sure. - "Where'd he go?"
Fits with his character. "Let's be 100% about this before we commit to anything."
Are the laser shots going the wrong way?
That's always bothered me. It feels like they are.
Shut up.
Otherwise, you did a perfectjob.
- No, actually, they're surrounded. - So that other guy's...
The guy that's right off-screen, he's just a really bad shot, too.
This just looks beautiful, this shot right here. And the way you turn around, it's awesome.
Yeah.
Now, this next shot, I think Seth drew this in the storyboards.
It's not in the movie, right? This is a pretty sweet idea.
- That you can see him, a little a flyby. - "Easy."
I love how you took your time with the shots of when it's approaching the moon later -
you having four, those series of shots...
Yeah. We really studied the movie frame by frame.
- Was this on television? - Yeah, this was on television.
This joke, to me, is for real Star Wars fans.
Who has not hummed that theme while even thinking about this scene?
- This is a great piece of music. - Yeah. And it's called "Here They Come".
It's kind of like when kids are playing toys or something, you have to hum.
Isn't this a DVD extra for?
There's the...
Did they do that - this 3-D thing?
I saw something. I saw a test on it.
- Are they doing that, Kim? - Yeah, we're getting a nod. Yes.
I can't wait to see that.
- People love this gag. - It always gets a big laugh.
That explosion looks like it's from the movie, but it's not.
- It was recreated by our animation studio. - Fantastic.
I thought right up till this moment that that was from the movie. I did.
"Don't get penisy" - a very funny line. Steve Callaghan.
Off of "Don't get cocky", the original line.
This the actual clip of Leslie Nielsen from Airplane!.
We were gonna have him do it, but he's very expensive.
And he also might be a little old.
So we just lifted it right from the movie.
I love this, the repeat shots.
He also blinks. In that last shot Peter blinks, which is great.
It's just amazing that our overseas studio did that - how good that was.
It does do that in the movie. He shoots and it seems closer,
then it cuts to it again and it's further away.
OK. OK. OK, but I gotta go.
He's working.
Did we do, in the first draft, the TIE fighter battle? I feel like there were jokes here...
You're right. The TIE fighter battle, we added after the animatic.
So that whole section was later.
This wasn't on television was it? This conversation?
- No, this was out too. For time. - A call-back to the couch.
It's nice.
Yeah, that's my couch. Rebel scum.
- Why is he upset? He threw it out. - These shots are great.
- Yeah, just trying to recreate the movie. - And this next one.
Shout-out to Andi Klein and the timing staff, who paid meticulous attention to every frame.
Nice.
And this joke is hilarious. This was Kirker Butler.
- He pitched this late too, I feel like. - Yeah.
I think it's actually funny because itjust takes so long for there to be ajoke there.
It's, like, five minutes later, "What's going on here?"
Mike Henry's observation about Magic Johnson in interviews,
that he'll make a lame joke and then buy it back.
Buy back something that he never really sold.
Mike, you had to do a lot of work on this scene.
Yeah, there's a lot of little things - moving mouths around and eyes.
The basketball net, too, that was a problem.
It's all about eyelids. His eyelids are that way, during the joke, and then the other way.
To do this clip, I had to get permission from the 20th Century Fox lawyers.
In order to do that, I had to show what we were parodying.
So I acquired dozens of clips of Magic Johnson doing exactly that form of talking.
- This wasn't on TV. I love this. - That's actually Judd Nelson, too.
I love them chuckling.
And this stuff...
This is Joe's stuff, right? That was cut too, for time.
That was definitely cut. But it's still in there now?
This is from the special edition, cos Biggs was cut out.
And it's funny that it's cut from our show and cut from Star Wars.
- It almost seems deliberate. - Yeah.
It was deliberate, right? Like the other things we talked about earlier.
This is the Family Guy Star Wars special edition.
Let's just get through this.
But people did miss Joe, not seeing him in the broadcast version,
so it's good to see it all intact again.
There's a scene that never made it, even in Star Wars, with Biggs and Luke on Tatooine.
- Yep. - Yeah.
- Didn't know that, did you? - No, I didn't know that.
- There are pictures of that, though. - Luke's wearing a hat.
I've seen the footage. It's like American Graffiti.
- It's a bunch of teenagers... ...cruising through town.
Seth, is this a comment on baskets of stuff you get from Fox or something?
Not Fox.
The cheese is always really yucky,
and there's always that little champagne bottle and there's tons ofjellybeans.
It sits around your house for a few weeks, then sadly goes out.
You think you might get to it, then you throw it out.
But keep sending it, please.
- John Viener doing Sean Connery. - Helen Reddy and the guy from Simply Red.
- That's the Simply Red guy? - It is?
Yep.
That rotten bastard. I thought that was me for a while.
And Helen... That was a brazzle dazzle day when she was in here.
It was.
That shot of the laser blast crossing the screen with no ships on it is funny.
I love the blur, too, on the shots where the background is blurred
cos the camera's moving so fast. It's very realistic.
There was the Wilhelm scream. Did you hear that?
It's a scream they use in a lot of movies.
- That was the actor, right - Wilhelm? - I think it was his character name.
It's a scream that sound editors use. It was recorded in the '50s from a movie.
If you look up "Wilhelm Scream" on YouTube, you'll find it. And every movie uses it.
Going through this scene, Dom kept saying, "What was it in the movie?"
We had to keep watching the movie over and over again to match the shots.
Yeah. It seems easier to direct this stuff than it was
because at every stage somebody would do something completely different,
and I'd be like, "Did you see the movie?"
- This is great. - This is Chevy Chase and Beverly D'Angelo.
Rerecorded these lines for us. Or recorded them.
It was an exciting day. A little bit of Family Guy trivia: John Viener, writer and actor,
played Chevy Chase in a TV movie about Gilda Radner.
I have never seen that, and I would love to get my hands on that.
I bet he's hilarious.
I don't think intentionally.
Did you guys? Obviously, an Airplane! reference.
That was a music edit there, too.
Those kettle drums, those timpani, we just extend and play them over and over
anytime there's dialogue.
As a kid, I used to draw this Death Star battle a lot.
For the artists, was this, like, incredibly hard work? Or was itjoy?
It was both. What do you think, Joe?
It was great.
It seems like there was a certain joy in getting paid to draw what they loved.
Yeah.
- There we go. That's perfect. - Doesn't that look great?
Oh, Danny. Poor guys.
Yeah, there they go. Never got to be singers.
It would have been funny to show a shot of them harmonising.
If only we'd thought of that.
- Special edition. - Down in their cabin.
It is amazing how many people involved with Family Guy absolutely love Star Wars.
Wasn't that original line here, "You feel my ghost finger inside you"?
"You gotta get used to that."
- And this ending was not in the... - That's right. Not in the TV version.
It was the biggest cut.
In the movie, he yells "Carrie!" as he gets off the ladder. Nobody agrees with me on that.
Yay. Thank you, Biggs.
Yay! I'm part of things, too. Yay!
He made him a sandwich.
Now, this ending changed too. We had a different ending and then we did this,
obviously, the inside joke about Robot Chicken - Chris bringing that up.
Seth Green is the executive producer of Robot Chicken.
This is Cherry Chevapravatdumrong's pitch, to make reference to Robot Chicken.
It's the highest-rated show on Cartoon Network,
and the "Star Wars" episode doubled that audience.
It's an amazingly inside joke, and yet it's so funny - so many great responses.
All right. What did we learn from that, fellas?
What did we learn from that?
The low per center.
This is just like... You have to know so much information to get this joke.
- Dr Chapstick. - It's coming back.
Yeah. I think that would be awesome.
Maybe in another galaxy far, far away but somehow in the future.
I'll give you that, Danny, when I've checked that.
I know it's coming, season 12.
In season seven.
From beginning to the end, this was ajoy.
This episode was so much fun to do.
And, of course, the Family Guy theme arranged in Star Wars style by Walter Murphy.
Nobody will freeze-frame their TiVo the way I did,
but I believe there's a funny credit here. Maybe I'm wrong.
I think on the TV one it said, "Danny Smith, Rush Limbaugh and Helen Reddy."
Yeah.
I just thought, "What side of the mirror am I living on?"
Every day you get out of bed, you don't know what's gonna happen.
This is nice that the scroll is slower on the DVD, cos it was much faster on TV.
All those people worked their tails off.
Yes. Except Artie.
- OK, not everybody. - Thanks.
Thanks, George Lucas.