TOON BEAT

family guyHoly crap, Lois! Remember the time when Family Guy writer Patrick Meighan got sent to the slammer for the heinous crime of occupying Los Angeles? What the deuce??? He set up a blog to share his ordeal.

I unlinked my arms voluntarily and informed the LAPD officers that I would go peacefully and cooperatively. I stood as instructed, and then I had my arms wrenched behind my back, and an officer hyperextended my wrists into my inner arms. It was super violent, it hurt really really bad, and he was doing it on purpose. When I involuntarily recoiled from the pain, the LAPD officer threw me face-first to the pavement. He had my hands behind my back, so I landed right on my face. The officer dropped with his knee on my back and ground my face into the pavement. It really, really hurt and my face started bleeding and I was very scared. I begged for mercy and I promised that I was honestly not resisting and would not resist.

With us Occupy LA protestors, however, they set bail at $5,000 and booked us into jail. Almost none of the protesters could afford to bail themselves out. I’m lucky and I could afford it, except the LAPD spent all day refusing to actually *accept* the bail they set. If you were an accused murderer or a rapist in LAPD custody that day, you could bail yourself right out and be back on the street, no problem. But if you were a nonviolent Occupy LA protestor with bail money in hand, you were held long into the following morning, with absolutely no access to a lawyer.

I guess you could say it was the opposite of “freakin’ sweet.” Giggity giggity goo, damn you vile woman, etc.

[My Occupy LA Arrest, by Patrick Meighan via AMERICAblog]

TOON BEAT

Holy crap Lois, they’re making a Family Guy MMO (that’s massively multiplayer online game), for some reason. So if you’re tired of stomping around Warcraft or whatever you can pretend to be a virtual Family Guy character and walk around Quahog making lazy pop culture references with other Family Guy fanatics. Wow!!! It’ll be like TV Tropes and Second Life had a baby, except with over 9,000 times more epic random for the win purple monkey dishwasher. I’m guessing there will be some “game” elements, like, I don’t know, beating up the chicken guy or the evil monkey (remember the time Peter beat up the chicken? Remember?). Will there be gang wars between Simpsons fans and Family Guy fans? Who knows! Nobody knows anything about this thing yet, all we know is there’s a site where you can pre-register for a beta, and if you view the page source, the description says “Sign up for the Family Guy Online today and receive news & events about the upcoming MMO!” So yeah.

Any MMO based on an animated sitcom is going to be horrible, but I gotta wonder why they didn’t do this for The Simpsons first – Springfield is a dense location with lots of places to explore, people are still obsessed with “Simpsonizing” themselves and celebrities (I have never, ever seen anyone on the internet “MacFarlaneize” anything), etc. Maybe they tried and it never came to fruition? Maybe Fox did some studies and discovered “the gaming community” knows The Simpsons is horribly lame now? The world may never know.

Anyway, here’s some funny tweets:

Sounds like a plan, y’all. [Family Guy Online]

WHAA...?!

to tahitiThe Cato Institute, the highly respected and influential libertarian think tank, just released an important study revealing that the Obama Administration’s push for high-speed rail is exactly the same as as an episode of a cartoon show:

Biden’s performance brings to mind the classic Simpsons episode “Marge vs. the Monorail” in which con-man Lyle Lanley convinces the town’s residents to waste money on an exciting-sounding high-speed train that turns out to be a boondoggle.

Looks like Vice President Biden made the mistake of talking to a group of people about transportation and being enthusiastic about it! Everybody knows you’re not supposed to do that anymore, or else you’ll be compared to a Phil Hartman character from 20 years ago. Doesn’t this guy have handlers?

There are some uncanny parallels between the two pitches.

OH I BET THERE ARE.

Continue Reading →

TOON BEAT

mike reissFamily Guy: “It’s like watching The Simpsons after three beers.”

King of the Hill:King of the Hill is like The Simpsons after… three strokes.” [UGO]

KANCELLATION KOUNTDOWN

my two centsI’m going to go out on a limb and declare that The Simpsons will finally, mercifully end in 2011, after twenty-two seasons.

  • The show has yet to be renewed beyond the 2010-2011 season (season 22), so there’s no guarantee there’ll be a Season 23.
  • In November, the Animation Guild blog mentioned that the writers were working on “another thirteen episodes”. Each production season, the last couple of episodes become the first episodes of the next season; these are called “holdovers.” The current season (season 21) has eight holdovers – notice the production codes in this chart. Presumably, this means next season will also have eight holdovers, which when coupled with the aforementioned thirteen episodes will fulfill a complete season order of twenty-one episodes, with no holdovers for a 23rd season.
  • The show has been losing a million viewers each season for the past couple seasons with no end in sight. It often gets lower ratings than Family Guy. Each episode costs somewhere around $3 million. All of these must be major concerns for Fox executives… but then again The Simpsons is the sixth-highest earner on television, and makes like a billion dollars from merchandise and syndication, so ratings are probably irrelevant.
  • The 20th anniversary hoopla feels like a final victory parade to me, a last hurrah before they ride into the sunset. It’s probably wise to end it while goodwill is high.
  • I just want to be right so I can look prophetic.
TOON BEAT

Omagh councilor Ross Hussey, of Ireland or something, got told he looks like the dad from Family Guy and now he might run campaign posters highlighting this resemblance in a misguided attempt to win over young voters. Look at the picture, it is funny. [BBC]

TOON BEAT

Sit Down, Shut Up, the recently-premiered TV cartoon on the Fox Network created by the creator of Arrested Development and produced by one half of the former Josh Weinstein/Bill Oakley Simpsons showrunning superteam, was pretty much cancelled (TV channels never actually say the word “cancellation” because it is like saying Voldemort, basically) in order to make room for the upcoming Family Guy spin-off about the black guy, which was picked up for a second season even though it hasn’t even aired yet. Yes, the first episode of Sit Down, Shut Up (or SitShut, as those in the ‘biz call it) was real bad, but it was getting better, yes/maybe/kinda?? Anyway, doesn’t Seth MacFarlane already have enough cartoon shows, and also the whole Spawn thing? “Simpsons Spinoff Showcase” is becoming true except for Family Guy because nobody in the world watches The Simpsons anymore, and even less people are watching the new shows [SFGate]

GROEN DRAIN

matt groeningSimpsons creator Matt Groening has always enjoyed a favorable relationship with the press. Serving as a sort-of go-to cultural commentator, the head of Fox’s billion-dollar cartoon franchise is often quoted on everything from animation to music to high school to Olympic mascots. These days, however, he is often asked to comment on Fox’s other billion-dollar cartoon franchise, Family Guy. In a Wall Street Journal article about Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane, MacFarlane’s contemporary is relegated to a handful of sentences, including a paragraph which curiously reads like a line from a Fox press release:

Cartoonist Matt Groening, creator of “The Simpsons,” says, “He’s laid the groundwork with this smash hit show and now, with new media opening up and Seth’s specific kind of rapid-fire visual humor, how to exploit it just depends on how ambitious he wants to be.”

Given that Fox and the Journal are corporate siblings, could this be another sign of The Simpsons‘s diminishing stature in the eyes of Fox executives? [Wall Street Journal]

ANNOYED GRUNTS

ptc presidentThe Parents Television Council, a media watchdog organization that aims to “promote and restore responsibility and decency to the entertainment industry,” recently examined the Fox network’s hatred of mothers:

In 1987, TV’s respectful treatment of mothers began to be replaced by an attitude of mockery and contempt – and unsurprisingly, it was the Fox network that began the trend. Married with Children‘s Peg Bundy was portrayed as shallow, vapid, incompetent at domestic chores (and everything else) and obsessed with sex. Dressed to resemble a prostitute, the Peg Bundy character also seemed to act and think like one. The constant put-downs directed at Peg by her crude and moronic husband character were echoed by equally intense contempt from her children.

And in the two decades since Married with Children‘s premiere nothing has changed, except that the mockery, contempt and even hatred shown towards mothers on Fox has become even more vicious and sadistic.

The May 11th episode of The Simpsons focused on the death of Homer’s mother, a former radical who abandoned him as a child. The now-deceased mother leaves her daughter-in-law Marge a purse made of hemp, as Bart informs his father that Grandma said “you don’t suck…THAT much.”

Yet The Simpsons‘ depiction of motherhood was as nothing compared to that seen on Seth MacFarlane’s animated “comedy” Family Guy. In celebration of Mother’s Day, Fox chose to rerun an episode in which Baby Stewie murders his own mother – after plotting to torture her…

For shame, Fox. [Parents Television Council]