In readiness for Christmas, HMV has got an exclusive box set of Robot Chicken: Star Wars Episodes 1&2. For those of you yet to discover Robot Chicken, it’s a twisted, pop culture referencing, stop motion animated television series, created and executive produced by Seth Green (Oz from Buffy, and voice of Chris on Family Guy) and Matthew Senreich.
The show parodies a large array of your childhood tv shows, from Thundercats to He-Man, through GI Joe and The Smurf. But the arena where they really shine is when they show their out and out geek-cred in the Star Wars parodies. Robot Chicken: Star Wars Episodes 1&2 are like the twisted dream of a feverish Star Ward geek who’s taken too much cold medicine, with all the subtlety of a diarrhea-suffering Wookie pounding on your bathroom door.
One of the things that really comes across in Seth and Matt’s parodies, despite the massive amount of fun they poke at the franchise, is that they are huge Star Wars fans. From Vader having to call the Emperor (voiced by Family Guy creator Seth Macfarlane) to explain that the Death Star’s been blow up, to the advert for Max Rebo’s Greatest Hits (including smashes such as ‘It’s Not Easy Being Blue’ and ‘I Already Told You, Im Not An Elephant’), and Admiral Ackbar Cereal (Your tongues can’t repel flavor of this magnitude!), there is huge geeky affection for the source material. This is also borne out by managing to get many of the original cast (Carrie Fisher, Billy Dee Williams and Ahmed Best to name a few) to voice their characters from the orignial movies. In fact, Lucas himself approved of the parodies so much, that it was anounced earlier this year that he’s working with the Robot Chicken team on an animated Star Wars sitcom!
Although the Robot Chicken: Star Wars episodes themselves aren’t all that long, the DVD’s also include over 4 hours of special features, including: Chicken Nuggets, Animation Meeting, Behind the Scenes, Deleted Scenes, Trailers, Alternate Audio, Production Design, Time Lapse, Photo Gallery, Video Blog, Panel Presentations, Episode Commentary.
The Limited Edition Robot Chicken Star Wars: Episodes I & II set including exclusive artcards, and is available on DVD October 25th, at £9.99 RRP exclusively from HMV.