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S01E24: Suds Up with Self-Deprecation!
37 Plays1 year ago
Lego Star Wars: Rebuilding the Galaxy has arrived, with all sorts of self-deprecating humor. Let's take a look at how Star Wars has lampooned itself over the years, and what it might really be saying about the franchise.
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Transcript
Star Wars and Self-Parody
00:00:00
Speaker
Star Wars likes to make fun of itself. Let's explore. Grab your joints and prunes. It's a Star Wars cleaning crew.
00:00:08
Speaker
Welcome back to the Star Wars cleaning crew. This week, we are going to talk about how Star Wars, and I think this all comes from George Lucas, always has been really good at making fun of itself. So the occasion for this is that on Friday, the 13th of September, Disney Plus released the new Lego Star Wars Rebuilding the Galaxy miniseries, so it's a four-part miniseries each part is half an hour long So essentially it's like a two-hour movie in four parts. It's a it's very funny It's all about the idea that there's a whole McGuffin that makes this happen, but the whole Star Wars galaxy gets rearranged so Darth Jar Jar really is a thing and
00:00:53
Speaker
ah Ray is evil and Darth Maul is good and you know all sorts of things like that happen. It's really very funny and I want you to check it out. But before we talk too much about that, I was watching this and I realized Star Wars has always done a really good job of making fun of itself.
Early Parodies and Variety Shows
00:01:13
Speaker
One of the first examples of this that everybody is aware of is the Star Wars Holiday Special. Let's listen to a little clip from the Star Wars Holiday Special. This is Harvey Corman as a cook on a cooking show with multiple arms.
00:01:29
Speaker
Stir, whip, stir, whip, whip, whip, stir. Stir, whip, sir whip whip whip start on let's try it to get stir, whip, whip, stir, whip, whip, whip, stir. Now, if you have endured the entire holiday special, you're probably stickering a little bit. You know, it's a very funny scene, but here's the thing. Most people think this is the first time that Star Wars kind of lampooned itself, but it really wasn't. I think the earliest time on television that we got a Star Wars spoof was on the Donnie and Marie show, where with uncanny prescience, they cast Donnie as Luke Skywalker and Marie as Princess Leia. So foreshadowing that they are brother and sister, but this was very goofy back in the disco era of the seventies. Let's listen a little bit.
00:02:33
Speaker
And that's about enough of that. You did hear R2-D2 make a little cameo appearance and on the show he was right there. C3PO was there. R2-D2 was there. It was insanity. And this was just the beginning. Luke and R2 and 3PO appeared on the Muppet Show. It was just something that I think they were interested in as much publicity as they could get. So George Lucas was very free about his characters appearing on all these 70s variety shows, all these comedies. It it was just absolutely, absolutely goofy.
00:03:09
Speaker
Now as time went on and Lucas really didn't need the publicity for Star Wars. It was the hottest thing in the world. He still had this attitude that he was okay for people to play in his playground and make fun of it and have some fun with it. As long as they were respectful for it. And as long as they weren't.
00:03:26
Speaker
you know, doing anything that was really going to damage the property. So this went on and on and on for years. ah One of the things that a little bit more recently caught a lot of attention was when they did some spoofs of Star Wars on the show
Modern Spoofs: Robot Chicken to Detours
00:03:45
Speaker
Robot Chicken. So this was a show on Cartoon Network, on Adult Swim,
00:03:51
Speaker
A lot of little comedy sketches that were made with action figures. They did a bunch of episodes with the Star Wars characters. And this is possibly the most famous one. It's the idea that right after the first Death Star is destroyed, the Emperor is hanging out with some of his some of his minions up in his in his office, and he gets a call from Darth Vader.
00:04:19
Speaker
Go for Papa Palpatine. You have a collect call from... Joss Vader. I gotta take this, hold on. Vader, how's my favorite Sith? Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Just slow down. Huh? What do you mean they blew up the Death Star? oh a and a F***!
00:04:50
Speaker
Oh my gosh, one of my absolute favorites, the aluminum Falcon. I just absolutely adore it. Seth MacFarlane doing the voice of the emperor there. And that kind of became the definitive comic emperor voice. We got a lot of Seth MacFarlane as the emperor. We got a lot of other people imitating Seth MacFarlane imitating the emperor.
00:05:12
Speaker
But just that tonality and that attitude and Palpatine is absolutely fantastic. Speaking of Seth MacFarlane, he is another guy like Seth Green, who actually created Robot Chicken. Seth MacFarlane is another comic guy who just absolutely adores Star Wars and loves to make fun of it. So he did so on his own show, Family Guy, where they did three episodes, each one spoofing an episode from the original trilogy.
00:05:42
Speaker
Here's a clip from that and this is featuring, you know, in the original Star Wars when the Death Star is shooting and you see the guys who are in the tunnel where the green beam is coming out to destroy the planet and they kind of turn away from it. So imagine it's these two guys who are talking.
00:06:01
Speaker
So anyway, I says forget the dental plan. Forget sick leave. I just want a railing. You know? One railing. Right here. Yeah, I know. I've almost fallen over that thing so many times. So what'd they say? Oh, get this. They said they're worried we'd be leaning all day. Oh, they said that. Yeah. Well, none of this will matter when we're famous singers.
00:06:20
Speaker
It's great stuff. And I actually learned about both Robot Chicken and Family Guy. I was a little bit aware of them, but I was at a Star Wars celebration and I went to a session with both Seth MacFarlane and Seth Green and they showed scenes from these shows and I was instantly hooked. It was great. So we were kind of in this new modern, ah just post prequel era of spoofing Star Wars, largely led by Seth Green and Seth MacFarlane. In fact, George Lucas decided to commission Seth Green to create a whole new series of spoof episodes like this. So these were going to be produced by Lucasfilm called Star Wars Detours. And my understanding is they actually have many episodes of this done and in the can. In fact, I can play you a little clip from one of them right here.
00:07:17
Speaker
Suffice it to say, I got a refund. A genius decided to install one bathroom per mile in this place? You know, I bet the Emperor's bathroom has one of those heated toilet seats. No way, dude. Come on, you're doing the peepee dance. Come on, scented candles. You got us electrocuted the last time we set foot in the Emperor's throne room. A nice selection of magazines, you love magazines. We had a royal guard who was supposed to stop bad ideas like this. Oh, Murray? Now he's out on paternity leave. Now picture this. There might even be a guy who hands you a nice warm towel and guilts you into tipping him, huh? Little mince? Some cologne? Absolutely not! Come on! Don't fight the floo- Fine! Oh neat! The toilet's a throne!
00:07:56
Speaker
Okay, I have to admit, not as funny as the other stuff. Eh, it kind of makes me wonder if having Lucas directly involved kind of messes up with the humor. I'm not sure that George Lucas's sense of humor always aligns with mine completely. Although I will take that back a little bit because in the process of working on detours, they actually released this video that George Lucas and Seth Green and the entire crew of Star Wars detours participated in. The backstory you need to know about this is they talk about Mary Jade in here. Mary Jade is one of the characters from the Star Wars extended universe.
00:08:37
Speaker
And there was always a lot of, ah you know, questioning about how much George Lucas really liked or approved of the extended universe. So that's what they're playing on here in this clip. As the creator of Marjade, he- Wait! I am not the creator of Marjade. And I want you to get out of this office right now. I'm sorry, Zed. No way. you brought it No way. You brought it on yourself. I don't want you here. I'm so sorry, George. I didn't think it would go like this.
00:09:06
Speaker
there I'm sorry about that. I'm so sorry. We'll have him like burned and well, I don't even know who that guy is. Now that is funny. It would be funny if it was a George Lucas impersonator. And even though it sounds like a George Lucas impersonator, that was the real George Lucas doing George Lucas at it it was hysterical. So that's great stuff. Now, what happened to Star Wars detours? You're asking yourself. So they've got all these shows done. Why haven't we seen them? Well, the answer is.
00:09:37
Speaker
This was the moment when George Lucas sold Lucasfilm to Disney and Disney announced immediately that they would be producing new Star Wars movies. And what they said, and I think that it was wise, they said, we're not going to release this right now to make fun of the franchise when we are trying to reboot it and restart it.
00:10:00
Speaker
And like I said, I thought that was probably a wise decision. At some point, we might see some of those Star Wars detours episodes. ah You could probably get bootlegs of them. You can see a lot of it on YouTube. So if you're interested, you can keep looking
LEGO Star Wars: Continuing the Tradition
00:10:17
Speaker
for that. So Star Wars detours is on the shelf.
00:10:21
Speaker
But where Disney era Star Wars decided to keep the humor going was with the Lego Star Wars franchise. So I remember they first announced the Lego Star Wars video game and I was just perplexed. I was like, what in the world could this possibly be? Doesn't seem like fun. Like what what in the world would you do? But.
00:10:50
Speaker
Of course, the very first LEGO Star Wars game, it was great. It was super fun. And all the LEGO Star Wars games are really fun, but they have this great sense of humor. And again, it's this great sense of deprecating humor, self deprecating humor that really makes it endearing. So there has been a lot of LEGO Star Wars stuff over the most recent years.
00:11:13
Speaker
like I said, a lot of games, but also a lot of specials. You can see most of them on Disney Plus. ah Short videos, longer videos, things like that. Now that leads us to where we are today, which is this Lego Star Wars Rebuilding the Galaxy series. And let me play you a clip from the trailer for that show. It'll kind of capture the attitude that we have. So this is where they are first running into Luke Skywalker,
00:11:41
Speaker
in the cantina of Mos Eisley on Tatooine, which is by the way, now a beach planet. Let me see if I have this right. In your galaxy, my dad is mostly evil until he turns good for like five minutes and then dies. My own nephew betrays me and kills most of my best friends. And I spend decades alone until I use the force so hard that it kills me? Well, when he puts it that way.
00:12:04
Speaker
You may have recognized that actually is the voice of Mark Hamill playing Luke Skywalker and completely lampooning the reaction that most of the haters had to the last Jedi, which we just talked about last week. Those are the things that people were complaining about and legend has it, those were kind of some of the things that Mark Hamill was complaining about too.
00:12:27
Speaker
But it was it was really funny. It was funny, but it's more than just being funny. I think the entire show of rebuilding the galaxy, just like this last clip, really kind of serves as a commentary on the current state of the Star Wars franchise, how there are some people who are OK with the changes, raising my hand here.
00:12:54
Speaker
There are some people who just want it to be exactly the same thing that they know, and anytime anything changes, they think it's blasphemy. And there's a lot of reasons for that. I can kind of see why. We could probably fill up a couple of episodes around why the fandom to Star Wars can be as negatively reactive as it is. I think it has something to do with, for many people, Star Wars basically being their mythology, the foundation of their morality, kind of even their religion.
Star Wars as Modern Mythology
00:13:30
Speaker
So when you start messing with it, it gets a little bit challenging. But yes, I know, I just took this conversation way deeper than I started. The thing is, make sure you watch LEGO Star Wars, Rebuilding the Galaxy.
00:13:46
Speaker
It'll take you a couple hours. I think you'll really get a kick out of it. There's a good, not just the spoofy stuff, but there's a good hero's journey story that goes along with it. And while you're watching it, kind of think, you know, what does this say about the current state of the franchise and what my own reactions are to it? I think you might get something out of it.
00:14:08
Speaker
So that's it for this week. Next week, if all goes according to plan, we're going to bring back Ben and Phil and take a look at the rise of Skywalker, finish our sequel rewatch until then. Keep your kitchens clean. May the force be with you. Tell all your friends about us and we'll see you next week.
00:14:49
Speaker
Oh yeah!