Family Guy has a tendency of fall into Shallow Parody whenever they feel like inserting a mean-spirited Take That! at a show/person that the writers don't like, and many of the things it tries to pass off as "parodies" feel more like cheap, half-hearted plagiarism.
- The episode "Blue Harvest" parodying Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope has a few:
- First up the episode features a joke about the Cantina band, Figrin D'an and the Modal Nodes, simply playing only one song over and over again. To be fair it's a joke that isn't unique to Family Guy. Not only can you very clearly hear a change in music from the uproarious Benny Goodman-like "Mad About Me" to a mellower BGM, the friggin' soundtrack has both Cantina songs!
- Also, Danny Elfman doesn't conduct his scores, in spite of what the joke about how they'll have to continue the movie with Elfman after John Williams kicks it would lead you to believe.
- When Peter enters in Blue Harvest as Han Solo, he declares that he's the only one who still had a career after the film. To name three, Alec Guinness had already had a massively successful career before A New Hopenote , Mark Hamill went on to a successful voice acting career (most notably defining the voice of the Joker for an entire generation), and Carrie Fisher, while her acting career was hit-and-miss, was Hollywood's go-to script doctor for several decades. Never mind that Peter is supposed to be Han Solo, not Harrison Ford.
- First up the episode features a joke about the Cantina band, Figrin D'an and the Modal Nodes, simply playing only one song over and over again. To be fair it's a joke that isn't unique to Family Guy. Not only can you very clearly hear a change in music from the uproarious Benny Goodman-like "Mad About Me" to a mellower BGM, the friggin' soundtrack has both Cantina songs!
- The infamous "Randy Newman sings about whatever he sees in his vicinity" joke from "Da Boom". The writers only seem to have chosen him because his is an easy voice to imitate — Newman is actually an accomplished protest writer and satirist who writes about very adult topics, though due to Small Reference Pools most people only know him for the Lighter and Softer fare he's written for animated features. The joke makes slightly more sense in context: it's After the End and most of the world's a barren wasteland, and one must pass the time somehow...
- Another example is showing an episode of All in the Family that depicts Archie Bunker joining the Klan and burning a cross. This is in spite of the fact that a focal point of the series was that Archie's prejudice is not malicious in the least but rather he was a product of his time and upbringing, that his "bigotry" was more born of general misanthropy rather than hate of specific races and groups, and that he actually opposes violence and mistreatment of others. Despite his vitriolic mouth he was a noble good man at heart: his treatment of Lionel Jefferson was ignorant and insensitive, but well-intention-ed and the two shared a genuine mutual friendship in spite of it, and one of the most famous episodes had Archie denounce the Klan and prevent a cross burning, after being horrified to discover that he had accidentally joined such an organization.
- One episode features a Game of Thrones parody in which Brian muses about how opening a bed and breakfast "couldn't be worse than joining the Night's Watch." the gag itself involves Brian minding his own business before being whacked against the wall by WunWun the giant before being stabbed to death by several Night's Watch members for no reason. The giant had nothing to do with Jon Snow's assasination.
- The show parodied Disney's run of Sequelitis in the 2000s in "Lois Kills Stewie" and "Foreign Affairs" with a fourth Aladdin film about Jafar going to an eye doctor and a fifth about him taking a census. Jafar was Killed Off for Real in Aladdin: The Return of Jafar.
- The Quentin Tarantino portion of "Three Directors" paints Tarantino movies as more pointlessly violent than they actually are, with a hero that murders random civilians for trivial reasons. Tarantino's movies are incredibly violent, but characters that murder innocent people willy-nilly are usually the villains. For example, the Kill Bill parody has Peter wake up from a coma and blind his doctor for no reason ("unnecessary but cool!"), whereas in the film, The Bride wakes up and kills two people for a good reason – an orderly was selling access to her comatose body, and a "customer" was about to rape her - and never kills anyone for no reason, even giving some of her enemies the opportunity to walk away and be spared from her Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
- A scene from "In Harmony's Way" has the Griffins watch an episode of Muppet Babies where Kermit and Miss Piggy are looking over their son Kermie, Jr., a grotesque pig/frog hybrid begging to be put out of his misery. This disregards that Muppet Babies was about the Muppets as children rather than the Muppets' own children. In addition, whenever Kermit and Piggy have children in Muppet productions (most famously The Muppet Christmas Carol), it always follows Gender Equals Breed.
- Done intentionally in "You Can't Handle the Booth! / New Phone, Who Dis?" with the sequence where Peter sings "Halfway Down the Stairs" from The Muppet Show, with the gag being that the entire song was played completely straight. According to the characters' commentary, the song was only included out of protest from Peter himself. Lois of course criticizes this scene, telling him that a reference on its own does not count as a joke.
- A cutaway gag about Deadwood has Bullock and Wild Bill looking at a Playboy magazine while complaining they can't get an erection... because their wood is dead, get it? Bullock is one of the main characters in Deadwood, but Wild Bill is an odd choice for a skit because he's only in the show for 5 episodes and is barely acquainted with Bullock by the time he's killed in the fourth. It would make more sense to pair Bullock with his Heterosexual Life Partner Sol Star, or with his frenemy (and show's most popular character), Al Swearengen. The background is also a typical SW desert with cacti, but Deadwood is set in South Dakota.
- One cutaway had the show spoofing Will Smith for his apparent goody two-shoes rap style but the lighter-skinned Smith instead resembles Cleveland's complexion and overall looks nothing like him. Additionally, his more sanitized lyrics were lampshaded later in his career, yet the portrayal of him is more indicative from the early 90s as evidenced by the box haircut and the bright clothing.
- A few cutaway gags use the old "Aquaman is useless" punchline, for example depicting him not saving a woman from being raped and simply standing a few feet away in the ocean and chucking a starfish at the attacker. However, the clearest demonstration that the writers don't known anything about Aquaman beyond Pop-Cultural Osmosis is a cutaway gag where Aquaman is shown having a stereotypical Secret Identity as "Arthur Curry", where he ducks under water for a second and emerges wearing a suit, with everyone telling him he just missed seeing Aquaman. Apart from a brief period in the Golden Age, where he was a very different character than he is today, Aquaman has never had a secret identity, and the fact that his real name is Arthur Curry is common knowledge around the DCU.
- A number of Anime jokes and references are absolutely steeped in ignorance about the medium and Japanese culture as a whole. When the joke isn't All Anime Is Naughty Tentacles, it's a pretty dated reference to poorly animated (and translated) action shows from the 80s and 90s. Such as the "Anime Peter" cutaway where Peter is drawn in a pseudo-Animesque style and is announcing his plans to go to the Clam with "noble Quagmire and Wheel-monster Joe" before flying off. On another occasion, in Road to the Multiverse the entire premise of the Japanese universe is just the family saying funny words in Japanese and that's pretty much the joke.
- One of the Three Shorts episodes, similar to Three Kings parodied Oscar winning movies with the FG cast. The first short, which parodied Silence of the Lambs was this, with things such as giving Buffalo Bill (Chris) "it puts the X on its Y" as a Mad Libs Catch Phrase, even though he only says it a few times, and parodying the scene where Lecter (Stewie) disembowels a police officer and wears his face as a mask as wearing the guy's complete skin as a Paper-Thin Disguise. All in all, it seems like they wanted to parody the movie but couldn't come up with any good jokes. Which is weird as the second short, parodying American Beauty was much better.
- The episode "Emmy-Winning Episode" has the family desperately attempt to win Family Guy an Emmy, and decide to copy several Emmy-winning shows in an attempt to do so. This is followed by several parodies of said shows, but their resemblance is surface level at best. One sequence is a mixture of Homeland, Breaking Bad, and Mad Men, with further references to other shows mixed in, but is utterly incomprehensible beyond some of the characters somewhat resembling characters from the other shows and having the most base-level jokes, like Orange Is the New Black having lesbians in prison, The Sopranos ending in a Smash to Black, Walt's son in Breaking Bad having a physical disability, Game of Thrones having a dragon and White Walker, The Wirenote being about drugs and gang violence, and Better Call Saulnote having a guy called Saul who you call (which isn't even correct, as the show about the origins of Saul).
