For those not familiar with Adult Swim’s Robot Chicken it is essentially a professional version of people putting on funny voices and being silly while playing with toys. This special Star Wars version is perhaps its ideal format - for a lot of people memories of Star Wars feature the action figures as strongly as it features the films themselves. Usually tainted with a slight hint of regret that they took the figures out of their packets and made them pretend-kiss each other when they could have been worth hundreds of pounds…

Once you’ve got your head around the high concept there isn’t much left to explain. It’s some very, very funny stuff - some sketches don’t work as well as others of course (the George Bush has force-powers section springs to mind) but they are very much in a minority compared to the good stuff. Boba talking to Han’s carbonite-encased body, talking space slugs complaining about not catching the Millennium Falcon as it flies off and so on. Plus how often have we been able to say that Jar Jar Binks is the best bit of anything Star Wars related?

The job of this review isn’t to try and highlight every funny bit, but rest-assured that it does a very good job indeed in that regard. But buying a DVD at a little less than full price for a single episode of a show is pretty hard to justify. The special features could really have made it worthwhile, but unless you have a massive crush on Seth Green you’re quite likely to reach for the fast forward key to avoid the extended footage of him and his “kerazy” staff being well “kerazy” and “zany” and suchlike. It genuinely made me wonder how they made something so funny as the main episode…but if you like that kinda thing then there is a good couple of hours to get your teeth into.

So what it comes down to is whether it is worth the money and what decides that is how much of a Star Wars geek you are. If you’ve only seen the flicks once and forgotten them there is very little here for you, but if you’re as much of a geek as the creators clearly are then you’ll probably get your moneys worth from repeat viewings with friends. It’s something almost everyone will enjoy, if not enough to buy it.

Despite that, it is still hard to recommend universally.

COMPETITION NOW CLOSED!