Robot Chicken: Star Wars

• 1. Introduction

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  Robot Chicken: Star Wars began with a phone call that Darth Vader placed collect. In a sketch from the show's second season in 2006, Palpatine received that call informing him that the Rebel Alliance had just destroyed the Death Star. The sketch was conceived by Doug Goldstein, originally imagining Palpatine as a Bob Newhart-style character, then rewritten by Breckin Meyer. It spread on YouTube until it reached George Lucas himself. Impressed, Lucas invited Seth Green and Matthew Senreich to Lucasfilm headquarters for a meeting. What happened next produced a 22-minute special that aired on the 17th of June 2007, timed just after the original Star Wars film's 30th anniversary. The questions worth sitting with: how do you parody something that has already been parodied for 30 years? And what does it take for the creator of a mythology to hand the keys to a stop-motion comedy show?

• 2. The Lucasfilm Deal

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  Lucasfilm gave Green and Senreich permission to produce a 30-minute full Star Wars parody, a significantly larger canvas than their usual output. Green described the moment plainly: "The people at Lucasfilm realized you could do a comedic take on Star Wars without compromising the integrity of any dramatic take." The writing staff spent three weeks developing material, a process that yielded an episode twice the length of a standard Robot Chicken installment. The writers made a deliberate choice not to self-censor. They understood that Lucasfilm would flag anything unsuitable for broadcast, so they wrote freely. Lucasfilm's director of marketing, Tom Warner, acknowledged that a few sketches gave him pause. He noted that there were definitely a few he would have batted an eye at and probably would not have included himself, but added that the team was having fun with it. That working arrangement shaped how far the comedy could travel. Goldstein framed the creative challenge directly: "It was a wild challenge to come up with fresh, new stuff since Star Wars has already been parodied for 30 years now."

• 3. Finding the Mundane in the Extraordinary

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  Seth Green articulated the show's comedic engine with precision: "We love to emphasize the mundane in the extraordinary, and Star Wars was perfect for that. You have something that's intergalactic, and yet there's got to be some textural machinations of day-to-day business: How can you run an industry that large without paperwork? And where are the bathrooms?" That philosophy runs through nearly every sketch in the special. An AT-AT pilot sits on the toilet during the battle of Hoth. A janitor sweeps up Darth Maul's corpse on Naboo and then sweeps up Mace Windu's on Coruscant, each time wishing for a transfer to somewhere better. C-3PO triggers a metal detector at airport-style security and assumes it must be his keys. An Imperial officer explains to new recruits that Vader cannot actually Force-strangle anyone, and that they should simply pretend to choke so he does not resort to his lightsaber. Rather than mock Jar Jar Binks outright, the writers had him reunite with Darth Vader and remain blissfully unaware of how much his old friend had changed. Goldstein flagged that choice as the kind of fresh angle the team was deliberately chasing.

• 4. The Cast Assembled

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  Mark Hamill voiced Luke Skywalker in exactly one sketch: the sequence in which Darth Vader reveals a cascade of Star Wars spoilers, including Leia being Luke's sister and C-3PO having been built by Anakin. That cameo was the only place in the special where Hamill appeared. George Lucas voiced himself in a sketch set at a Star Wars convention, where a fan dressed as a Tauntaun helps Lucas escape a crowd and gives him a ride to the speech platform. Conan O'Brien voiced both Zuckuss and a character identified as Ponda Baba's boss, and also hosted a parody of Late Night with Conan O'Brien titled Mid-Night with Zuckuss. Hulk Hogan played Abraham Lincoln in a sketch where George W. Bush, having discovered he is a Jedi, duels with the former president. Joey Fatone of 'N Sync made a vocal cameo in a posthumous advertisement for Max Rebo's Greatest Hits. Seth MacFarlane voiced Emperor Palpatine. Ahmed Best, who originated Jar Jar Binks in the films, returned to voice the character here. Seth Green himself voiced the majority of the remaining characters. Doug Goldstein had wanted James Earl Jones to reprise Darth Vader, but the production was unable to secure his participation.

• 5. Three Months of Stop-Motion

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  From finished script to completed episode, the production took three months. After the script received Lucasfilm's approval, animators storyboarded each scene, dialogue was recorded, and the two tracks were merged into an animatic. Stop-motion animation of custom-made action figures, the show's standard method, was used throughout. Each animator produced 12 seconds of footage per day. Green directed the animation team, and they completed their work in two weeks. Editing, visual effects, and sound effects occupied the following two months. Lucasfilm provided the production with original sound effects from the films. One sketch that did not survive to the final cut involved Han Solo and Greedo repeatedly attempting to shoot each other and missing, a parody of the Han shot first controversy. The completed episode ran 22 minutes and aired on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim block.

• 6. Reception and Awards

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  Green won the Annie Award for Best Directing in an Animated Television Production for the episode. The special was also nominated for Best Animated Television Production at the same awards. Its Emmy nomination, for Outstanding Animated Program (for Programming Less Than One Hour) in 2008, went to the Simpsons episode "Eternal Moonshine of the Simpson Mind." A reviewer at IGN described the special as "head and shoulders above the hit and miss nature of the regular episodes of Robot Chicken." A Variety critic wrote that "Lucas' fantasy has frequently sailed the smoothest when he takes a back seat and leaves the starship piloting to someone else." A reviewer at Entertainment Weekly, writing about the DVD release, stated that every adult cartoon had produced a Star Wars parody but that the Robot Chicken team topped them all with 23 guffaw-filled minutes of stop-motion work. A critic at The A.V. Club offered a measured positive assessment, saying the episode had 15 minutes of strong gags and was pitched squarely at anyone who grew up with the lesser-known Star Wars toys, naming the Ugnaughts, Bossks, and Dengars from the Kenner toy line. The DVD was released on the 22nd of July 2008, and two sequels followed: Robot Chicken: Star Wars Episode II aired on the 16th of November 2008, and Robot Chicken: Star Wars Episode III aired on the 19th of December 2010.