Family Guy: Partial Terms Of Endearment

One of the things I despise in any form is censorship.  I also understand that there is a difference between censorship and a company making a decision on what they want to carry, publish or present on the air waves.  I don’t necessarily like it when a company wusses out, but I understand it and I also understand it is not necessarily censorship.  I also realize that I have the power to react to these decisions as well.  Wal-Mart doesn’t think I’m smart enough to be able to choose between uncensored CDs or edited ones, so they choose to carry only the edited ones.  As a consumer I prove them wrong by choosing to buy my CDs anywhere except Wal-Mart.  They’re not really censoring the music, but in many ways they are economically censoring the artists since they are the largest retailer and they refuse to carry the artists uncensored version.  In some communities where Wal-Mart is the only game in town, this does practically result in censorship.

Last season the Fox network refused to air an episode of Family Guy because it dealt with abortion.  They refused to air it, but they did not stop Seth MacFarlane from producing the episode for future DVD release.  Recently that was just what happened.  The DVD comes in a plastic slipcover that resembles a brown paper bag, and when the case is slipped out, the cover shows Peter in a trench coat apparently smuggling out the banned episode.

The episode itself is fairly typical Family Guy.  Peter attends Lois’ college reunion and meets her old friend Naomi.  Lois tells Peter that she and Naomi experimented together during college and so when Naomi asks for a favor, Peter immediately starts thinking 3-way.  It turns out Naomi is married and her favor is to ask Lois to carry her child as she is unable to do so herself.  Lois agrees and right after the procedure, Naomi and her husband are killed in a car wreck.  Now Lois must decide whether to carry the child or have an abortion.

The episode would not likely have created much of a stir with regular Family Guy viewers, but the PTC and its ilk would have had a conniption fit.  When episodes like this air, the PTC and Focus on the Family start their mass produced protest letters to the FCC and threaten the advertisers with boycotts.  It galls me that the FCC should legitimately consider these mass produced complaint letters especially when you consider that most of the people who send them in never watched the episode in question.  It’s also amazing to me that advertisers take the boycott threats so seriously as well, but they do.  Most people don’t carry through on boycotts especially if it is something they like.  I boycotted Wendy’s for over 20 years because of poor treatment at the Huntington Mall location when my wife was pregnant, and I still boycott Geico because they caved in to the above mentioned groups and pulled their ads from the television series The Book Of Daniel. 

So how does the episode rate?  I thought it was pretty decent.  Like any episode of Family Guy, some jokes hit and some jokes don’t.  Of course lots of the time the jokes that don’t hit for me will have someone else laughing hysterically.  I would give this one a 8 1/2 on the Night Flight scale.

Family Guy Peter Griffin Vs. The Giant Chicken

I was browsing through FYE back in late January and I ran across what appeared to be a FYE exclusive.  It was a DVD with all three of the Family Guy episodes that featured Peter Griffin fighting the giant chicken.  I have watched Family Guy, but I am not a rabid fan by any stretch.  At the same time, I am not a rabid anti-Family Guy person either.  I think it’s funny, but not as drop dead funny as Robot Chicken or Frisky Dingo.  On average I like South Park better than Family Guy, but there are episodes of Family Guy that I like better than certain episodes of South Park.  That being said, I own all of the Family Guy season sets as well as Blue Harvest and Stewie Griffin. 

Of the three episodes on the chicken trilogy disc, I had only seen one, the middle one.  The first episode on the disc was Da Boom.  Peter is out picking stuff up for a millenium party when he is warned about Y2K and how it would be the end of the world.  Naturally he overreacts and converts his basement into a fallout shelter to protect him and his family from the upcoming apocalypse.  When the clock strikes midnight, all of a sudden Peter is proven right.  Planes fall out of the sky, nuclear missiles launch, the world comes to an end.  Peter and his family now have to deal with the post apocalyptic world and their mutated friends (and eventually family).  The first chicken fight takes place during Peter’s early shopping trip as he explains to a man in a chicken suit why he never accepts coupons from chickens.  Apparently the giant chicken had given Peter an expired coupon and that started their city spanning fight with Peter punching and the chicken pecking until Peter appears triumphant and walks away.  The episode ends with a very special twist ending featuring live action actors from another famous series.

The second episode, Blind Ambition, finds Peter trying to do something that he can be publicly recognized for.  All of his buddies have some sort of award or press accolades, and Peter wants that too.  He ends up deciding to go for a world’s record, but choosing one that causes him to go blind (eating nickels).  This time the chicken ambushes Peter as he is standing on the sidewalk talking to his neighbors.  The fight gets more outlandish, culminating in a Raiders of the Lost Ark spoof with an airplane.

The final episode, No Chris Left Behind, concerns Chris getting kicked out of school in order for the school to improve its standings and receive funds for No Child Left Behind.  Lois talks to her father and he gets Chris accepted at a posh private school for the rich.  Once again the chicken appears out of nowhere and he and Peter are at it again, but this time they end up talking and decide that they don’t really recall why exactly it is that they are fighting.  They shake hands and end up going out to dinner with the wife of the giant chicken at an out-of-the-way restaurant.  The meal goes great, but when it is time to pick up the check, they begin to argue about who gets to pay for the meal.  This leads to another fight and once more Peter walks away the winner.

There aren’t any bonus features as this was done mainly as a promotional item.  All three episodes are enjoyable with Da Boom probably being my favorite.  However if you judge them solely on the chicken fights, No Chris Left Behind probably takes the prize.  Family Guy is a staple of Adult Swim which is about the closest thing we currently have to Night Flight.  So on the Night Flight scale Da Boom gets a 9, Blind Ambition gets an 8 and No Chris Left Behind gets an 8 1/2.  Overall, I would rate the DVD as 3 stars.