George Lucas’ 1977 masterpiece, Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope, is known by many to be the start of one of the greatest film franchises in the history of cinema and, it only took Seth MacFarlane and company thirty years to compose a parody. The entire film played out like an honest trailer as it pointed out numerous flaws (that, in reality, were not truly flaws) and poked fun at some dialogue and character choices throughout the original film. While major plot details and character arcs are not something that MacFarlane had to consider when creating this extended episode, he did have to consider how to incorporate his standard of comedy into the very serious events within Lucas’ film. He, with the help of writer Alec Sulkin, created a nearly seamless collaboration between the two pop culture phenomenons. With this particular group of people at the helm of this production, it ran the chance of tirelessly judging the original film while failing to deliver the way MacFarlane typically does. Yet, the film managed to present itself as a tribute to the uniqueness and the success of the ‘77 paragon of cinema. One of the biggest challenges that the team at Fox would have dealt with must have been the length. Clocking in at just over two hours, it would have presented itself as difficult to condense the film to just over forty-five minutes. The original story is deep with great character development and a forty-eight minute runtime would not have left those working on this episode with a lot of leeway in terms of what they could and could not develop throughout the course of the show. Still, the group managed to condense the film successfully and the episode, as a whole, played out quite well. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0888817/?ref_=ttep_ep1
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