Hot on the heels of Family Guy's Blue Harvest parody of Star Wars comes Adult Swim's take on George Lucas' most famous creations, Robot Chicken: Star Wars. For those unfamiliar with the series, Robot Chicken skewers movies, music, television and other facets of pop culture using... action figures! It might sound kind of strange - and it is - but the series, created by Seth Green and Matthew Seinreich, is actually a lot of fun and often times quite hilarious.

Essentially what we have with this twenty-three minute episode (that's right, all this excitement over twenty-three minutes!) is the Star Wars skits that have appeared in past episodes of Robot Chicken collected alongside side a bunch of new bits that debuted in this special episode for the first time. What can you expect out of a Robot Chicken skit? A couple of examples...

-A fierce battle is raging on the snow swept planet of Hoth where a massive AT-AT stomps across the ground. Inside, a man uses the bathroom and reads the latest issue of 'Naboobies' magazine. Luke Skywalker tosses a grenade into the AT-AT causing the man on the toilet to curse out loud.

-Darth Maul falls to his death and a lowly janitor sweeps up his remains. Later, Mace Windu and Darth Sidius also fall to their deaths. The janitor mutters that he wants to transfer to Coruscant.

-C-3PO is trying to get through a metal detector at the airport wondering why he keeps setting off the alarm, thinking that it must be his keys. R2-D2 gets put on the conveyor belt and scanned like a suitcase.

-George Lucas (who does his own voice work) shows up at a Star Wars fan convention where a man dressed like a Tauntaun tries to help him escape from a mob of fans. Fast forward and the fan is an old man, telling those who will listen that this was the best day of his entire life.

-George W. Bush discovers that he's got Jedi powers and he users his abilities to convince his wife to have a three-way with Condoleeza Rice, vandalize Bill Clinton's car, vandalize the Lincoln Memorial and then fight Lincoln himself. It all turns out to be a dream, sadly, and when Bush wakes up he has to deal with the lack of WMD's in Iraq.

If any of those gags sound remotely funny to you, then you'll enjoy this show. The humor definitely pokes fun at not only the Star Wars universe but also the fans who have turned it into the phenomenon that it is, but it does so affectionately and from a fans' point of view. There are so many strange little inside jokes here that only Star Wars fans could possibly pick up on that there's no doubt that the crew that worked on this show is made up of fans. Attentive viewers might notice a few fun celebrity voice cameos in this episode which adds to the fun. Conan O'Brien, Seth MacFarlane, Malcolm McDowell, Hulk Hogan, James Van Der Beek, Robert Smigel, Donald Faison, Abraham Benrubi, Breckin Meyer, George Lucas, Mark Hamill, Ahmed Best and Joey Fatone all pop up and lend their talents to the mayhem.

Aside from the humor, what's also impressive about this episode is how it makes it very clear what a huge part of pop culture Star Wars has become. When you take into account not only how many jokes the writers could mine out of the material but also how many different action figures from the series are used here, it says quite a bit about the importance of the Star Wars films and their legacy.

Not every skit is pure gold - when you pack in over thirty of them that simply stands to reason - but more often than not the hit the right mark and with all the details and little subtleties in the skits, there's a lot of replay value here.

Video:

The 1.33.1 fullframe picture on this DVD looks better than you'd probably expect it to. Color reproduction is nice and bright without looking overdone while detail levels stay pretty strong and consistent throughout. There's a little bit of shimmering here and there but not major problems with mpeg compression artifacts or edge enhancement to complain about. There's a bit of softness to the picture at times, but really, the quality here is perfectly acceptable.