Monday marked the announcement of yet another Star Wars TV series, which was met with much groaning from the world of entertainment journalism. I think that's a shame, because it seems like many of them had sharpened their barbed headlines before really reading the good news in between the lines of the announcement.
The series is slated to be an animated comedy set in the Star Wars universe under the creative guidance of executive producers Seth Green and Matthew Senreich, creators of ""Robot Chicken."" With these guys on board, this project has stellar nerd cred dripping all over it. We could potentially be looking at a weekly half-hour ""Robot Chicken Star Wars Special"" here, people! Get excited!
That being said, it is possible that even the minds that brought us Admiral Ackbar Cereal could run dry on ideas of Star Wars parodies from time to time. In the spirit of goodwill toward the project, I humbly submit some suggestions for sitcom premises in the Star Wars universe that they can rip off in lieu of any better ideas:
""How I Made the Deal to Get You Cloned""
This series follows Jango Fett and his bounty hunter buddies in the days before Jango settled down to raise his future badass son, Boba Fett. The whole series is an elaborate explanation to young Boba of how he came to be conceived in a test tube, told in twenty minute vignettes in which Jango and his horny robot pal IG-88 go to Cloud City bars and try to score with alien women using outrageous schemes and bamboozles. Jason Segel stars as a Wookie.
""Forced Labor""
A human teenager knocks up his Twi'lek girlfriend, and the pair fears that her Jedi father will swiftly slice the two of them into cauterized pieces with his light saber should he find out. Instead, the teens convince her dad that the child was conceived on midi-chlorians alone, leaving the two guiltless. This means they have to cook up all sorts of ways to make the new baby seem like the chosen savior of the Jedi, including faking force-choke on small animals, making things float with wires and claiming he built lame robots so he could have a friend.
""The Sheldon Company""
Sheldon Cooper, from ""The Big Bang Theory,"" accidentally opens a wormhole during his string theory research that leads him to the Cloner home world, where his endless annoying inquisition of the facility results in him being dissected by the aliens for genetic material. They accidentally include his DNA in the latest batch of Clone soldiers shipped out to the frontlines of the Clone Wars, leading to an entire platoon of Sheldon Coopers being sent to the frontlines to annoy Jedis and droid soldiers alike.
""Accidentally In the Belly of a Sarlacc""
Jenna Elfman and the rest of the cast from CBS's dreadful ""Accidentally on Purpose"" are digested slowly and painfully over the course of thousands of years in the belly of Jabba the Hutt's prized beast/bounty hunter disposal unit. It would be a hell of a lot funnier than whatever the show is about now—Jenna Elfman can even still be pregnant for some reason. As long as she's being digested, it's golden.
Mark has officially expended his Star Wars nerd capital—all he's got left is shouting ""It's a trap!"" at people as they walk past his house at night, which doesn't seem to go over well with passing squad cars. E-mail your much more clever Star Wars sitcom ideas to mriechers@wisc.edu.
