Production
Robot Chicken had previously featured several Star Wars parodies in standard episodes of the show. One such sketch from the second season in 2006 featured Palpatine receiving a collect call from Darth Vader informing him of the Death Star's destruction, shortly after the conclusion of A New Hope. The sketch was pitched by Doug Goldstein (with Palpatine originally portrayed as a Bob Newhart-esque character) and rewritten by Breckin Meyer. The skit became popular and was uploaded to YouTube until it was eventually seen by Star Wars creator George Lucas. Impressed, Lucas invited the show's creators Seth Green and Matthew Senreich to Lucasfilm for a meeting. They permitted Green and Senreich to produce a 30-minute full Star Wars parody. Green noted "The people at Lucasfilm realized you could do a comedic take on Star Wars without compromising the integrity of any dramatic take."
The duo and the rest of the show's writing staff then spent three weeks writing material for the episode, with it being twice the length of a standard episode. The writers did not intentionally tone down their material as they knew that Lucasfilm would inform them of any items unsuitable for broadcast. Lucasfilm's director of marketing Tom Warner noted that "There were definitely a few I batted an eye at, and if I were producing probably wouldn't have put in. But they were having fun with it." The writers decided not to choose "obvious" things to subvert so, for example, rather than just penning a sketch mocking Jar Jar Binks, had Jar Jar meet up with Darth Vader and react to the changes he has undergone since they last met. Goldstein noted "It was a wild challenge to come up with fresh, new stuff since Star Wars has already been parodied for 30 years now." On the style of the humor, Green opined: "We love to emphasize the mundane in the extraordinary, and 'Star Wars' was perfect for that. You have something that's intergalactic, and yet there's got to be some textural machinations of day-to-day business: How can you run an industry that large without paperwork? And where are the bathrooms?"
From writing to animation, the episode took 3 months to produce. After the script was finished and approved, the animators storyboarded each scene and the dialogue was recorded before the two were merged into the animatic. As with the other episodes, stop-motion animation of custom-made action figures was used to produce the episode. Each animator produced 12 seconds of footage a day and the team, which Green directed, was finished in two weeks. Editing, visual and sound effects then took a further two months. Lucasfilm supplied them with the sound effects from the films. A sketch parodying the Han shot first controversy (which saw Han Solo and Greedo repeatedly attempt to shoot each other, but continually miss) was cut from the episode.
Green voices the majority of the characters, with others such as Mark Hamill, Conan O'Brien, Malcolm McDowell, Hulk Hogan, Ahmed Best, Joey Fatone as well as Lucas making appearances. Goldstein wanted James Earl Jones to appear, but they were unable to get him.
Read more about this topic: Robot Chicken: Star Wars
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—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)