Fairly indicative of the fact that the key creative team behind Family Guy weren’t interested in making part III of their Star Wars parodies is the shown when midway through a 60-minute commentary track, creator and star Seth MacFarlane just gets up and walks out.

Apparently their hands were tied, they phoned it in, they wanted the leverage so MacFarlane could take whatever time he needed to direct his debut film this year. Truth be told, you can only take the ‘Fox made us do this’ argument so far. They seem openly contemptuous of this parody, of Return of the Jedi and the whole process in general.

As it happens, I ended up liking It’s a Trap! a lot more than anyone involved in its production. There are a host of strong, laugh-out-loud gags; I remain a fan of both Star Wars and Family Guy franchises. This ain’t rocket science, it’s just a pleasant distraction.

Some of the gags work very well – from one Family Guy staple of stretching a gag way past its breaking point, climaxing with a choice cut from Caddyshack; the ribbing of Seth Green; the Ewoks being bloodthirsty cannibals; the Emperor being a total dick and using force lightning to cover up the smell of his farts.

Some of it doesn’t work as well, such as the Endor speeder bike chase being re-done with pushbikes. Not a lot of funny in that. Also, yeah, enough with the Conway Twitty cutaways.

On the plus side, there are plenty of laughs to be had at the expense of ROTJ throughout the hour, and this episode represents the first HD rendering – it looks fantastic, and the audio is superb. Again with the basic contempt, however, as they seem to have phoned in the DVD special features, which includes a 30-minute segment devoted to four people playing Star Wars Trivial Pursuit. Yeah.

This is the last of their Star Wars parodies, as the prequel trilogy hardly needs the piss taken out of it.