Why Family Guy Won't Parody The Star Wars Prequel Or Sequel Trilogies

"Family Guy" fans will often try to claim that the show's best years were its original three-season run, but I'd argue that the show's peak was somewhere around season 6. The series' comedic style had fully found its groove by this point, not to mention that it really started to lean into the Brian/Stewie duo episodes that everyone loves so much. Best of all, this was the beginning of the show's annual "Star Wars" parody specials.

For three years in a row, we got to enjoy a version of "Star Wars" where all the characters were acting like "Family Guy" characters. It not only created a really fun guessing game of "Who are they gonna pick to play X?" but gave the writers a chance to bring their neurotic observational humor into this familiar cinematic world. It's one thing for Peter to repeatedly groan while clutching his knee; it's another thing to see a giant robot camel pull the same schtick.

The best part was that, as much fun as the episodes had with nitpicking certain aspects of the original "Star Wars" trilogy (mainly, why'd the Empire keep placing self-destruct buttons on their Death Stars?), the "Family Guy" writers clearly had a ton of respect for the movies. At one point, they have Chris Griffin's Luke pause the plot simply to introduce us to "John Williams and the London Symphony Orchestra, everybody!"

But as for the prequels? Well, it doesn't seem like they love them quite as much. "I think the 'Cleveland Show' is doing those," Peter says dismissively at the end of the "Return of the Jedi" special. The sequel movies weren't around at this point, but even in the many seasons that have since passed, they've never done a special about them either. So what gives?

Just a year after the "Return of the Jedi" special, our corporate overlords at Disney purchased Lucasfilm. This complicated things for "Family Guy," which was not bought by Disney until 2019. "The new regime at 'Star Wars' slash Disney is a little more difficult to deal with," explained "Family Guy" producer Alec Sulkin at a panel at the 2016 San Diego Comic-Con. "Before we were just dealing with Lucasfilm and Seth [MacFarlane] had a good relationship with them. [...] I just think that [Disney's] a little more rigid."

But now that both properties are technically part of the Disney belt, shouldn't that mean they could make more hour-long parodies? Well, even if they could, it's not clear if they want to. "We like the first three, but by the time we were done with the third one, I think we were about ready to kill ourselves," Sulkin explained, and you can definitely see that attitude play out in the specials themselves. "Blue Harvest," which focuses on "A New Hope," clearly has the most energy of the three. The jokes-per-minute ratio is off the charts there.

However, by the third one, the episode itself was constantly pointing out how the writers were barely trying anymore, including an intentionally dragged-out nodding scene and an opening crawl that reads, "We don't care. We were thinking of not even doing this one. Fox made us do it." I, for one, love that ridiculous nodding scene — it goes on for so agonizingly long it somehow loops back around to being funny again — but the sense of fatigue throughout the special is still impossible to ignore.

Another problem with a new trilogy of "Star Wars" parodies is that the prequels and sequels don't provide particularly easy casting choices. In the originals, Chris as Luke and Peter as Han made sense, but who would Chris be playing in the prequels? If it's Anakin, then who's playing Padme? Because it can't be Meg or Lois. As for the sequels, would Peter reprise his role as Han? Because if so, he's not going to have a lot to do in the later two sequel parodies.

Basically, were "Family Guy" to do another set of movie parody episodes, it might be best to ignore "Star Wars" altogether. Maybe it would be better to do a series of "Indiana Jones" specials, or perhaps "Back to the Future." The most obvious choice, however, is probably the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. It's another series with a large but mostly consistent group of characters all throughout, complete with its own prequel trilogy for Peter to dismissively refuse to do.

It seems pretty straightforward to cast Peter, Quagmire, Joe, and Cleveland as the four hobbits, with maybe Carter Pewterschmidt as Gandalf, Meg as Gollum, Brian and Stewie as Legolas and Gimli, and so on. It's clear from dozens of fun cutaways over the series that at least one person in the "Family Guy" writers' room really loves "The Lord of the Rings," so if the show ever did decide to do a high-effort parody, this would seem like the most straightforward choice.