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.