Top 8 (Or Rather 10) ‘Star Wars’ Parodies
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Humor is probably the most subjective emotion. Watching the same scene could make one person roll on the floor laughing while the next person just shakes their head (or the other way around). Our sense of humor also changes over time. Things that you might have found hilarious as a kid just make you cringe a few years (or decades) later.
So, coming up with a ranking of the best Star Wars parodies that most people can agree upon borders on impossibility, but we will do it anyway.
First, it is probably a good idea to define the term parody within the context of this article. We are looking exclusively at films, television specials, and YouTube series that primarily focus on spoofing Star Wars, either on a single film or the saga as a whole. Even though the 1993 Hot Shots! Part Deux is a parody and includes a rather lengthy lightsaber duel, it is not on this list as it does not focus on Star Wars alone but also many other movies of the 80s and early 90s. The Star Wars Holiday Special from 1978 also did not make the list. It would have made a great parody if it only were any funny.
Without further adieu, we are moving straight to the top Star Wars parodies.
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8. Hardware Wars
Released in October of 1978, this 13-minute masterpiece was written and directed by Ernie Fosselius. It is set up as a trailer for a sci-fi movie that makes fun of Star Wars. With a budget of just $8,000, it tells the story of Fluke Starbucker, Ham Salad, and Chewchilla the Wookiee Monster who try to save Princess Ann-Droid from an evil empire.
All spaceships are represented by some kind of household hardware. The Millenium Falcon is a steam iron, the escape pod is an audio cassette, the Death Star is a waffle iron, R2-D2 is a strange-looking vacuum cleaner, and Alderaan is a basketball.
Most of the charm and humor of Hardware Wars stems from its conscious cheap and amateurish look. Rian Johnston even made a small reference to the short in The Last Jedi.
7. Phineas And Ferb: Star Wars
This hour-long cross-over episode of the popular animated kid's show and the space opera debuted in 2014 and more or less retells the story of A New Hope with the titular characters, two pre-teen stepbrothers influencing the events of the movie in a "just outside the camera" way. The special includes all the usual characters of the show. Candance, the annoying sister of the boys, who plays a stormtrooper tasked with getting black socks for Darth Vader. The evil Doctor Doofenshmirtz tries to become a Sith Lord. The Platypus Agent P, as always, is the only competent character of the show.
Phineas and Ferb: Star Wars is available at Disney+.
6. Troops
This 1997 mockumentary by Kevin Rubio more-or-less jump-started the fan film movement. Unlike Hardware Wars, the 10-minute film offers a high production value. Troops shows the (mis)adventures of a group of stormtroopers stationed on Tatooine in the style of the television show COPS. In the course of the film, the audience learns what happened to the Jawas and their sandcrawler, and why Owen and Beru Lars were burnt to a crisp, although stormtroopers never hit anything.
Troops won the Pioneer Award at the first Star Wars Fan Film Awards in 2002.
5. Bad Lip Reading - Star Wars
The popular YouTube series Bad Lip Reading has created quite a few Star Wars specials over the years. Each episode, which is usually just a few minutes long, consists of cut-together scenes with the creators adding funny and often absurd dialogues, and sometimes singing them.
One episode with scenes from The Empire Strikes Back shows Yoda telling, or rather singing to, a rather confused Luke that he has been attacked by seagulls while walking on the beach. In another episode, Ben Kenobi confesses to Luke that his father has been killed by a creature with a chicken head, duck feet, and a woman's face that was hiding in the Bushes of Love.
4. How It Should Have Ended - Star Wars
This is another popular YouTube show that makes fun of big blockbuster movies by changing certain scenes or exposing obvious plot holes. There are How It Should Have Ended episodes for practically every Star Wars movie. For example, there is one showing what would have happened if the upper half of Darth Maul had attended Qui-Gonn's funeral or if the Jedi had acted just a little more cleverly after learning Palpatine's true identity.
3. Robot Chicken Star Wars
Between 2007 and 2010, Seth Green and Mathew Sennreich created 3 Star Wars specials within the Robot Chicken franchise. Using action figures and hilarious dialogues they recreated famous scenes from then all six Star Wars movies and gave them absurd twists and turns like a Force ghost of Jar-Jar Binks that haunts Darth Vader or Emperor Palpatine who gets increasingly more irritated while talking on the phone with Darth Vader as he confesses the loss of the Death Star.
Green and Sennreich later worked for George Lucas on the still unreleased Star Wars Detours series.
2. Family Guy Star Wars
Roughly in the same period as Robot Chicken, 20th Century Fox Television released their spoof of the original trilogy titled Blue Harvest, Something, Something, Something Dark Side and It's a Trap. Unlike Greene's and Sennreich's opus, the Seth McFarlane-produced trilogy more or less followed the events of Episodes IV-VI with the Griffin family taking the roles of the main Star Wars characters. Like much of the Family Guy humor, the show is not suited for a young audience due to its rather crude humor.
Before we get to the (obvious) number one, here are two honorable mentions:
The Emperor's New Clones: a live-action, feature-length fan film from 2008 that spoofs Revenge of the Sith.
Thumb Wars: a surprisingly funny, 30-minute parody of A New Hope where all characters are played by human thumbs dressed as puppets.
1. Spaceballs
Although Mel Brook's 1987 film also includes spoofs on Star Trek and Planet of the Apes, it is the epiphany of all Star Wars parodies. The adventures of Lone Star and his trusty co-pilot Barf, who try to rescue Princess Vespa from the clutches of the evil Dark Helmet, while being assisted by the know-it-all Yogurt and the power of the Schwartz include dozens of over-the-top slapstick scenes and hilarious dialogues.
The sequel mentioned in the film, Spaceballs 2: The Search for More Money, never came to be, but there was a short-lived animated show in 2008 aptly titled Spaceballs: The Animated Show.
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