Thursday, March 26, 2009

STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION ON FAMILY GUY


Star Trek: The Next Generation will reunite on an upcoming episode of Family Guy. Scifi Wire caught up with Family Guy executive producer David A. Goodman who had news that the entire cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation were ready to be spoofed on this week's episodeof Family Guy. He also talked a little bit about next Star Wars themed episodes.

The regular TNG cast—Patrick Stewart, Marina Sirtis, Jonathan Frakes, Gates McFadden, LeVar Burton, Brent Spiner, Wil Wheaton and Denise Crosby—play themselves in "Not All Dogs Go to Heaven," which finds Stewie building a transporter and beaming the actors into his room after he doesn't get to ask a question of them at the annual Quahog Star Trek convention.

"There's two stories going on in the episode. One story follows Meg and Brian. Meg finds God, and she finds religion and is giving Brian a hard time for his atheism. So that's one story, and when we developed that story we saw that Stewie didn't have a big role to play. So we then also developed a story to go with it, and the two stories tie together in the beginning, when the family goes to the Star Trek convention and Stewie doesn't get to ask his question. So he buys plans for a transporter and beams the cast into his room. But the other story is Meg and Brian, and it's them butting heads over religion. It's a subject we've done before in different ways, but this one has a new twist on it. We were struck by the fact that in America atheism is considered worse, by some people, than Muslim extremism. That was an interesting subject for us, we've thought. And we've always said Brian is an atheist, so he seemed the natural [character].

I think, but I'm not absolutely sure, that Empire Strikes Back, that episode will air at the end of next season. It may be released before then [on DVD], but it'll air at the end of next season. That movie was a very different movie from the first Star Wars, so as a result our sequel is also a lot different, a lot of new characters, and a lot of great jokes that we threw in. We were very happy with how the first one turned out, so the bar was very high for the sequel. We're a little bit early for the third one, but because we're very happy with how Empire has turned out, the third one also, the bar is set even that much higher. And I think we're ripe to disappoint people..."
I hated Family Guy when it first debuted. It wasn't until the last couple of years that I watched another episode and was instantly hooked, laughing through the entire episode. I'm still not a fan of the first few seasons but Family Guy must have hired new writers because the episodes have greatly improved. Sure, there have been some very bad episodes this season but hopefully this Star Trek episode will put them back on track. Let's hope they "make it so."

Click here to read the entire interview.

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