Hacker Cinema
Family Guy
1999 · TV series · 24 seasons
Created by Seth MacFarlane
Sick, twisted, politically incorrect and Freakin' Sweet animated series featuring the adventures of the dysfunctional Griffin family. Bumbling Peter and long-suffering Lois have three kids. Stewie (a brilliant but sadistic baby bent on killing his mother and taking over the world), Meg (the oldest, and is the most unpopular girl in town) and Chris (the middle kid, he's not very bright but has a passion for movies). The final member of the family is Brian - a talking dog and much more than a pet, he keeps Stewie in check whilst sipping Martinis and sorting through his own life issues.
7 positive22 negative85 neutralfrom 114 commenters
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124 comments on Hacker News
I've been pretty interested in cars lately, and Engineering Explained has some great videos. They can stretch a bit longer than 20 minutes, but I'll just pause the video and come back to it later when I have time.
And given that I've been interested in cars lately, Delivrd is a channel of this guy that negotiates car deals for a living, and it's actually really interesting to see the different behaviors of car dealerships. His videos are longer, but you can kind of just skip around since it's basically just livestream clips.
And finally, I've been watching lots of older spongebob, south park, and family guy episodes. Man those are hitting the spot right now.
I believe it was Family Guy season 3 episode 4 in which the Drunken Clam is taken over by the British and turned into a pub, and when Peter and his pals try to storm it and take it back they get defeated by means of biting wit and clever sarcasm. That kind of focused negativity would be an awesome image to live up to, but instead you paint a picture here of habitual incoherent cattiness, it seems like some unfulfilled potential. But I have no specific proposal in mind, guess I'm just moaning about it.
They still are. My kids haven't watched a single Simpsons or Family Guy episode but are quoting both regularly.
Facebook et al also quite literally stole email contact lists and installed spyware at kernel level on mobile phones which they used to spy on all Android users. Via the phone manufacturers.
>they own a house on a single income.
You want aspirational, look to Family Guy. Somehow Peter Griffin can afford a helicopter, a jet pack, and whatever expenses are required to obtain the foot of the statue of liberty.
>maintaining a 90s style of living is just not realistic in the 2020s
I think even in 1989, when the show debuted, two income families were starting to be (or already had been) pretty typical. I think the Simpsons might have been poking fun at the 1960s and 1970s family sitcoms where the dad went to work and the wife stayed home.
Edit: But you're right that in the 80s and 90s you would have a decent chance of buying a house (on those two incomes).
> I guess the Prius line was a popular “statement car” of the pre-Tesla era, though, like how Brian drives one on Family Guy, or the “Smug Alert” episode of South Park, but it was never that for me.
... So you admit to falling for Toyota product placement in cartoons.
I thought he was in a new episode of Family Guy
Apparently this is a movement started by Louis Rossman (Clippy meme explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xAGUrkDsj4) to protest the fact that the world feels like a dystopian hellscape run by evil corporations and greedy politicians. He's not wrong, but it's kinda felt that way since the 70s (see the movie Network for reference)
This is strange, because for those of you who aren't old enough to remember the ambient noise in this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3G_uCbKoG5A), you won't know that Clippy was infuriating. But I guess the choice is controversial, which someone popular on YouTube knows will get lots of discussion. So... cool?
For fun: Clippy being annoying on Family Guy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPeKsBmqlZs
AI responses literally reminds me of that episode of family guy where he sucks up to peter after his promotion
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZcKShvm1RU
Welcome to the future, where the notion of "classics" is just a point in the memetic information manifold:
https://x.com/theo/status/1973167911419412985 (Music video with Sam Altman as Skibidi Toilet)
This is pretty fun.
These keep getting wilder and wilder:
https://x.com/MatthewBerman/status/1973115097339011225 (Kinda gross)
https://x.com/cloud11665/status/1973115723309515092 (Japanese)
It can do cartoons:
https://x.com/venturetwins/status/1973158674899280077 (Rick and Morty)
https://x.com/TheJasonRink/status/1973163915476611314 (Family Guy)
https://x.com/cfryant/status/1973162037305024650 (Family Guy Horror)
Incredibly convincing anime:
https://x.com/fofrAI/status/1973164820863262748
Minecraft meets GTA:
https://x.com/Angaisb_/status/1973160337752121435
Super Mario in the real world:
https://x.com/skirano/status/1973184329619743217
Super solid looking movie trailer:
https://x.com/jasonjoyride/status/1973142061114335447
Damn:
https://x.com/theo/status/1973210960522559746
I started listening but got too reminded of the Rush Limbaugh Family Guy episode to continue more than a couple of times. It's all rage. 5 minutes of hate for our generation. Not constructive and not healthy.
I present the evidence of Family Guy episode _Fifteen Minutes of Shame_ airdate April 25, 2000 which had a Bob Ross bit. Bob Ross was part of the cultural zeitgeist long before the 2010s Internet memes. That has brought a new generation to him, but that's just bringing GenZ in line with the others.
Same for older family guy episodes also on Disney +… maybe it’s a Disney + thing where they can’t be bothered?
I'm reminded of the 'surfin bird' family guy episode where Peter is fishing for a prompt to sing surfin bird, and Brian in-good-faith bites, but Stewie yells at Brian for doing the bad thing.
It's like we've given up on the people with bad behavior to the point that we tacitly endorse them to have whatever terrible viewpoint they have, even while we admonish others like they're more responsible than the person with the bad behavior.
We have to stop giving bad-faith-actors the benefit of the doubt. RFK is a grifter. It definitely doesn't matter where he got the viewpoint from, he has 1 million terrible viewpoints that are not grounded in science. He's figured out how to pedal this as non-extremist and couch it in friendlier language, but that just makes him more of a snake.
Besides this just... not really being true of Lynch's films, it also misses how a Lynch film came to be. David Lynch didn't pull out a notepad and go, "Okay, time to write a Lynch film." He just decided to make a film and made it the way that made the most sense to him. His perspective on film-making, on people, compassion, curiosity etc. led the creation. At best (and this is seriously stretching the definition of "not just wild speculation") I think it's more likely you get something that exhibits formal qualities that remind someone of some of David Lynch's works, probably a fairly incoherent and incongruous mash of tropes, like a particularly bad episode of Family Guy. I don't know if I'd even credit that with praise as dismal as "imitation", it would be more like a visual laundry list. I'd love to see something that would cause someone to believe otherwise besides "AI learned how to string a sentence together, therefore one day it will be able to learn and produce literally anything," but it eludes me.
> Jokes are an example of something translators can do really well - things like puns don't work 1:1 across languages. A good translator will find a corresponding, appropriate line of dialogue and basically keep the intent without literally translating the words.
Again, those aren't "cultural translations" but "idioms translations", which I do agree should be translated into something understandable in the language, otherwise you wouldn't understand it.
What I was aiming at in my original comment was examples like these:
> Family Guy original voice-overs + subtitles making a joke about some typical father figure in Hollywood for example. Then the Latin Spanish subtitles will have translated that joke but replaced the specific actor with some typical father figure from the Mexican movie industry, while the Castilian subtitles would have replaced it with someone from the Spanish movie industry.
There was also the example of family guy copy-pasting a 10 year old youtube video of an exploit of an old NES game into an episode, and that video which predates the episode by 10 years (or something) then got taken down because it infringed on the family guy episode that copied the video.
I think this is the result of narrative structure falling by the wayside in lots of popular canons. You can tell a million variations of the odyssey because Odysseus is nobody. You can plop just about any set of characters into the story and it works. We still have stories like this, the Mission Impossible series is the same story told differently, the new Twister is a retelling, anyone can be James Bond. But if you want a long running series you need an interesting universe to explore (which requires rules and consistency) and/or compelling characters people want to put in situations. It's why Family Guy can do a Star Wars episode but Star Wars can't do Family Guy, it's why the Ghost Buster's retelling flopped because they thought it was a narrative story but it was actually a character story.
What I am really missing is a "Play random episode" or "Randomize episodes" button on TV shows. I want to just flip on Seinfeld or Family Guy and watch random episodes, not in order. Such a missed opportunity for Netflix, etc.
Sometimes like in Cheers, but plenty of references are using the modern version. Family guy season 2 used it in 1999 4 years before 4chan launched let alone became popular.
Now not everyone is going to use something just because it was on TV, but it definitely played a role.
Ehh normie was already in use well before 4chan. Family guy season 2 used it in 1999, 4chan only launched Oct 2003.
It’s slowly become more popular over time, but you can find much older references.
this is basically that family guy episode where Quagmire tries to get out of his marriage to a hooker.
A major issue with generated art is precision - you never get perfectly repeatable details.
Let's say if you try to make a Family Guy episode using generated video, the characters would come out slightly different in every scene. You could generate 100 outputs for every scene and try to pick the best one but it still won't be very good.
> A tear shed for Simpsons being called wacky humor
You know what I meant, hopefully? I predate the Simpsons, and I remember when they and their brand of humor first appeared. I also remember how annoyed I felt towards Family Guy (a cartoon I never liked, unlike the Simpsons) because it felt like a cheap copy. And yes, over the years the Simpsons turned wackier and wackier while retaining nothing of what made them good at first.
I don't claim Bojack and the Simpsons have the same kind of humor, it was a shortcut to hopefully explain what I found jarring about the former?
Given the rest of the comments, I'll try giving Bojack season 2 a chance.
Family Guy is built on out of context clips.
It could also fill it for background videos in scenes, instead of getting real content they’d have to pay for, or making their own. The gangster movie Kevin was playing in Home Alone was specifically shot for that movie, from what I remember.
I don't agree that it's just marketing. I'm not saying their products are perfect, they certainly have flaws. But the maniacal focus on quality is palpable in their products.
Play a Nintendo game start to finish, you will be very hard pressed to find ANY bugs or glitches. Like you have to hunt really hard to try to find them, they are usually an extremely polished experience. The same cannot be said for most other developers. I LOVE BG3, but it's certainly not as bug-free as a Nintendo game. Same with their hardware + system software, it never crashes, and has a very controlled "walled garden" feel.
There's a reason people use the term "Disney-quality animation". Because it's extremely polished and looks miles better than the competition. Watch the Family Guy episode where the drew part of the episode in Disney style and you can see the difference in action.
> With that wise suggestion, Weathers skyrocketed into the pantheon of the best "actors playing a version of themselves" in 21st century TV history, up there with Larry David in "Curb Your Enthusiasm" and Adam West in "Family Guy."
One that always gets overlooked is Ron Silver playing himself in Heat Vision and Jack. It’s an unaired pilot for a spoof of 80s “man on the run” series like the Incredible Hulk. It starred Jack Black, Owen Wilson, Ron Silver, Christine Taylor, and Vincent Schiavelli, made by Rob Schrab and Dan Harmon, directed by Ben Stiller. Ron Silver is an assassin working for (evil) NASA to hunt down the smartest man on Earth (Jack Black) and his talking motorbike (Owen Wilson). However Ron Silver plays himself – the assassin stars in Hollywood films as a part-time hobby (when he isn’t murdering people).
I doubt that very many people here even knows how civilians pirate things. These threads are always full of people describing how they have a 80PB ZFS array on OVH with a Plex server, unlimited Usenet block account, and 50 private trackers, acting like they’re describing anything relevant to anyone besides the ultra-nerdy.
Sharing streaming service passwords. 16-part Family Guy episodes on TikTok, and ridiculous ad-ridden streaming websites ending in odd TLDs are all the rage. The latest generation of young adults grew up on Chromebooks.
>so you should be aware that nothing you’re saying is new and it’s just as untrue now as it has been for previous generations.
okay, that's perfectly fine. I just wanted to talk about a family Guy episode, I wasn't looking to convince you of... well, whatever we're arguing about at this point. You win.
>Fortunately overcoming your baseless skepticism is not a prerequisite for winning the Nobel.
the COVID vaccine is the exact kind of example of why modern pharmaceuticals is a mess. I understand it was a global emergency, but the mess between 3 companies and the lack of clarification early on regarding insurance and what's covered or not (even though it was also offered insurance free). It shouldn't have been this debate on Pfizer or Moderna or J&J. It shoulda just been "COVID vaccine".
But yes, good on Katalin Karikó. I'm very glad she's getting and gotten the recognition she deserves.
Anyways this discussion has long ran its course and when you resort to insults it's time to disengage. Take care.
>Either you think it’s a meaningful example, which you manifestly do, or you think that it’s a joke and shouldn’t be considered seriously.
comedy is awareness, and awareness is an important first step. But awareness is not hard proof. It's at best a step to start investigations with.
So I don't know what you want me to say. I do see it both ways. Maybe there is a point, but nothing I can argue in a real capacity.
>Family Guy also jokes about virtually every other conspiracy theory
Indeed. but FG can be strangely prohetic at times. Not always (Trump Guy aired in like, 2019, 3-4 years after everyone made every joke in the book. And FG didn't add much there), but said episode aired in 2012. So we're talking nearly a decade before the internet consensus started taking this hard cynical anti-capitalistic approach.
Even family guy had a episode about this. Rich Father-in-law is sitting on a cure for cancer because he owns the pharmaceutical and can profit more off cancer treatment.
Not saying that FG is a good oracle to go off of, but if it's such a prolific mindset that comedy shows are riffing on the concept the people up top have definitely crunched numbers on such factors.
Former colleague of mine was Tesla from day 1. Started an online journal of the life of his car. It's stuff like "well this car is great but this year I spent a huge amount of money because A, B, C broke and wasn't covered under warranty". As time goes on the journal just gets worse & worse. Can't help but laugh and be reminded by the family guy episode where they see a Tesla driving itself while the driver's busy sucking his own dick.
We jumped away from "free market principles" the moment we forbade copying of those past Futurama episodes for 90 years. There is nothing naturally scarce about copies of creative works; we impose artificial scarcity through a government-granted monopoly in order to allow the creation of those works to be funded through the sale of copies[0].
Having a government commission decide what is and isn't a reasonable price does smell of command economy, but creative works already exist in a command economy. The only difference is that you can't Disney Vault your shit anymore. Boo hoo. In my opinion, once you've sold your work, recouped costs, and paid everyone, you shouldn't be able to then pull the coin out of the vending machine and take works off the market. We give monopoly rights in exchange for creative works being made and publicly available, not for them to be made and then thrown into a fire.
My personal opinion as to how to fix this problem would be to authorize the Copyright Office to issue compulsory licenses to reproduce works that are over 10 years old and either are orphan works[1] or whose known owners are unwilling to license[2]. These licenses would only be issued to libraries - i.e. either government-run libraries or non-profit agencies with substantially similar goals to one, such as the Internet Archive. And if someone can actually assert both ownership and a pattern of ongoing licensing then they can cancel the compulsory licenses that the libraries get.
We can actually determine what a 'willing license' would look like by looking at comparable deals in a particular market. If whoever owns Futurama wants to charge $10,000 a view but Disney is licensing The Simpsons and Family Guy out to Netflix for a few pennies per view, then we can safely conclude that the $10,000/view price is there just to keep the work off the market. We don't need the Copyright Office to say "anything more than $X per stream is too much."
[0] This is not the only way that creativity could be funded, of course. But it's the only way that mainstream buyers of creativity are willing to participate in.
[1] Works whose current ownership is unable to be determined. A lot of the games that are legally unavailable in the VGHF study are unavailable because the owners went out of business and the rights are tied up between four different creditors who all don't know what they own.
I think cancel culture is exactly the example of what you're talking about though. There ARE consequences for people who say socially unacceptable things on social media, so much so that it has its own phrase in our lexicon now.
How many times has some famous, or non-famous for that matter, person faced backlash because of something they said on social media? It's such a thing that there's an entire episode of Family Guy about it, where Brian gets cancelled and people stand outside his house telling him to kill himself for making a bad joke on Twitter.
Family Guy had a futuristic episode with a gag ad “Watch Family Guy on Fox, now owned by Disney, now owned by Netflix, now owned by Pornhub”.
The war in Ukraine ends. Not sure who 'wins', but it feels like resources are low enough on the Russian side that an end to the conflict will be a priority.
Putin might not make it through 2023. If he keeps pushing for the war and the rest of the elites/political sphere in Russia want it to end, I can see him being taken out by them.
Twitter crashes and burns. Musk is already doing everything in his power to achieve that, and it feels like the site/company is on thin ice right now, in pretty much every sense.
The Mario movie comes out, does well. Nintendo announces the Donkey Kong movie that's suppposedly in production, plus a few other adaptations.
The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom comes out, does well. Some people feel it doesn't do enough that's new, but the general design is good enough to get high review scores nonetheless.
Mario Kart 8 Deluxe gets character DLC
At least one long running show finally ends. Maybe this is the time The Simpsons finally comes to a close? Or could it be Family Guy, South Park, Spongebob, etc? Eh, if the Pokemon anime can be rebooted without Ash, this seems viable too.
Crypto continues to struggle, as people realise there aren't many use cases for things like Bitcoin outside of questionable activity and countries with broken economic systems.
The cracks show for Meta... Horizon Worlds isn't catching on, and Facebook is dying. Eventually it'll hurt the company financially too.
Discord tries to monetise its services more, users get annoyed.
Either the UK PM steps down, or another election is called.
The cat leaves the bag, and AI tech becomes usable outside of hosted services. All kinds of ethical questions get raised.
Are you referring to “Classic” style of prose as it is portrayed in the book “Clear and Simple as the Truth”? If so, good point. But in my opinion, taking your observation into consideration, the piece now falls even flatter if I were to interpret it as an attempt at that style of writing.
If the author stuck to just dissecting only Twitter or Seinfeld or Kierkegaard or Einstein using some supporting of details derived from just one of of those references, or even tied in one extra reference for robustness, that’d be great in my opinion. But this essay reads like it was constructed from a bunch of transcluded notes from an Obsidian vault or a zettelkasten (where reference upon reference can be taking due to bi-directional links between notes).
I can go as far as to say that this is less classic prose, than it is prose in the manner of a Family Guy episode.
> A bunch of humans did indeed watch a bunch of Disney films, and make a new animation based on what they saw. Did Disney - a notoriously litigious company - sue? Of course not.
Why would Disney sue themselves? Disney owns family guy.
In a world where Disney did not own it, Disney would probably sue if they used a cartoon mouse. "Style" may not be covered by copyright, but characters likely are. A human animator would know enough not to make a parody cartoon mouse look too Micky-like, but an AI wouldn't know to avoid that.
>But if I build an ML engine I apparently can take 100 of his images, produce similar images and charge money for it. Magic!
You can pay a human artist to produce "similar" images too, and as long as they aren't too similar it's fine.
You seem to be conflating - repeatedly - exact copies of a work with merely copying a style. Family Guy had an episode where Brian and Stewie visit a Disney universe, and everything was animated in the style of a classic Disney film. A bunch of humans did indeed watch a bunch of Disney films, and make a new animation based on what they saw. Did Disney - a notoriously litigious company - sue? Of course not. Copying a style is not infringement! I don't see why it's any different if an AI program does that.
I subscribe to Youtube TV and I feel like they have been doing this in there already. It was a great service and now not only do I have to pay $65 a month for the service but also have to watch 3 3-minute advertisement blocks during a 30-min episode of Family Guy. It's starting to make cable more attractive.
Seinfeld Effect:
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/seinfeld-effect
>The Seinfeld Effect is a phenomenon closely related to the Family Guy Effect (the idea that when a meme is referenced on a popular television show, it dies out). The Seinfeld Effect occurs when a TV show references an in-joke belonging to a subculture (in most modern cases, the Internet) and makes it mainstream, causing the show's viewership to mistakenly believe the meme originated with that show.
>The effect is named after the 1989-1998 sitcom Seinfeld's habit of referencing little-known ideas, jokes, and phrases, such as "Festivus," "yada yada yada," or "not that there's anything wrong with that," and making them extremely well-known through the show's populararity to the point that many have the misconception Seinfeld invented these phrases (for the purposes of this article, 1992 is listed as the meme origin date, as that was when the episode "The Contest" popularized the idea of masturbatory celebacy contests). [...]
Seinfeld Is Unfunny Trope:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunny
>There are certain shows that you can safely assume most people have seen. These shows were considered fantastic when they first aired. Now, however, these shows have a Hype Backlash curse on them. Whenever we watch them, we'll cry, "That is so old" or "That is so overdone".
>The sad irony? It wasn't old or overdone when they did it, because they were the first ones to do it. But the things it created were so brilliant and popular, they became woven into the fabric of that show's genre. They ended up being taken for granted, copied and endlessly repeated. Although they often began by saying something new, they in turn became the new status quo. It's basically the inverse of a Grandfather Clause taken to a trope level: rather than being able to get away with something that is seen as overdone or out of style simply because it was the one that started it, people will unfairly disregard it because it got lost amidst its sea of imitations even though it paved the way for all those imitators. That is, a work retroactively becomes a Cliché Storm. [...]
"One sees cartoons of pregnant men, and yet that is impossible for a biological man. True or false?"
To interject in this conversation: if this sentence really is "taboo" I'd argue it's perhaps because you are not using the currently accepted term, like a person who insists on saying "negro" instead of "African American".
Or perhaps it's taboo because you bring it up at weird moments. I just watched an episode of Family Guy where family patriarch Peter Griffith says "I won't be in the next few storylines because I am real life pregnant." The show is a cartoon, so the joke is both that he's "real life" anything (which is impossible) and also suddenly inexplicably being written as female.
But if you watched that episode with friends and start ranting about how Peter Griffith, cartoon character, can't get "real life" pregnant cause he's biologically male, people might think there's something socially off about you because that's a pretty odd reaction to a Family Guy joke.
Being 'cancelled' in academia and entertainment is a very real thing that happens to artists, but more notably, as I mentioned, suppresses tons of content across the board that won't even get pitched otherwise.
While some people do overstate it, it's definitely real.
Those who diminish it are the fascists of our generation.
Sean Penn (far left activist) and Conan O'Brien (staunch centre left advocate, public supporter of Hillary Clinton etc.) publicly decried the problem as 'Stalinist' - strong words. In their experience, in private conversation in Hollywood people are freaked out about the oppression, while a few virtue signal here and there publicly while towing the party line, everyone is thinks it's nuts.
Stephen Pinker (staunch centre-left, respected academic) has spoken out about this, and faced a 'cancellation' of his own for merely suggesting publicly that the issue with policing in America is more a general problem as opposed to specifically a racial problem. The 'mob' came for him and tried to have his participation on various boards 'cancelled'.
A long list of thinkers, including the likes of Chomsky himself, had to come out and publicly admonish the 'cancellers' (mostly on the far left) for the systematic problem.
It's without modern precedent.
There's a 'civil war' between generations at the NYT (Editorial) about what constitutes 'fair'.
The 'outrage mob' has a measurable effect on academia and especially creative culture.
Producers just don't want to risk a project being annulled, and so they go out of their way to 'sanitize' efforts left and right.
The Wachowski sisters (then brothers) were 'condemned' for 'Cloud Atlas' where they dared to have people of different classes, genders and races, play various characters - frankly in attempt to display the common humanity within all of us (not some arbitrary bit of ugly humour) - though the outrage wasn't enough to hurt them, it's become a 'no go zone' for content in 2022.
Actors playing characters of different source origin i.e. someone 'non Japanese' playing a character from Anime, actors playing historical figures, actors playing arbitrary fictional characters of questionable origin etc. etc. - it's all a minefield, scaring producers away from anything.
30 Rock, made by your typically socially progressive groups, had several episodes pulled.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Go ahead and re-watch 'Superbad' - it could not be made today, it wouldn't even get pitched. Every scene is 'off message' - arbitrary bits about crude porn, jokes involving trans people, 'period' gags. It was always a bit 'outrageous' but that kind of humour will risk too much ire and so it's out. Even the actors just wouldn't want to risk being on the wrong side - look at Seth Rogen's most recent work, it's like a 180 degree shift.
Institutional entities that have been around for some time, notably 'make money' and notably have their own production ability - South Park and Family Guy, basically get a free pass.
But most people in entertainment and academia do not have power like 'Dave Chapelle' or institutional protection like 'South Park' or respect of 'Stephen Pinker' - so they 'stay on message' and 'away from controversy' or else the script does not get approved. And FYI even the people turning it away aren't ideological about it 'it's just business' and an accommodation of the outrage mob, fickle advertisers etc..
The 'outraged' a fairly small group, with a sizeable group of allies particularly among Gen Z, which can be noted in the continuous public furor over ostensibly 'terrible person', JK Rowling. The way they go on about here is medieval.
While I don't think our campuses are overtly hostile, the issue does linger.
I really really loved Plex, then suddenly my networks internet connection went down, no biggie I thought, I have my collection on Plex. Plex no longer worked offline at all. Not sure if that’s fixed, but I always saw it as a file server with a UI and webplayer.
Plex also doesn’t let me pay for one premium subscription for the server so my family can watch old family guy episodes longer than 30 seconds on a phone. They each have to buy a subscription.
I still use Plex because so much infrastructure investment to get my parents to use it but honesty I’m not sure I’d recommend it anymore.
It seems someone at Plex decided they wanted the project to finally make some serious cash and started removing functions and moved them behind a paywall (like basic analytics of if someone is currently using it or what they have watched) while shoehorning in bizarre not even B-Movies.
All I can think about is the episode of "family guy" where Peter has birds nest in his beard
I think it's a Family Guy episode where the callout also gets called... names in reply to the announcement.
As a native speaker of Russian, I often see lamentations from native Russian speakers how "real cool" phrases in print and movies when translated from Russian into English become ugly and simplistic as if rendered by a caveman.
That's because a lot of Russian speakers are under the impression English is just a linear calque of Russian with English vocabulary[0]. But natural languages are not isomorphic to each other. I was just watching Family Guy and remembered this scene where Peter responds "I know my way around a joke or two" to a question "who's the funniest dude in the house?" or something to that effect[1]. The phrase "to know one's way around something" doesn't exist in Russian in its literal form. Speaking of "ways", the phrase "I fought my way to the top" is another one that doesn't have a direct Russian counterpart. These phrases are the product of English speaking mind. Russian has its own unique phraseology that usually gets butchered when ported into English. The point is what one thinks sounds cool in one's native tongue doesn't have to sound just as cool in the target language as natural languages never sat down at a round table to agree to have 100% linear correspondence between each other. By the way, in one Russian translation of that Family Guy episode they make up their own (I should say funny) joke instead of translating "I know my way around a joke".
[0] Obviously, you can replace "Russian" with any other ethnicity/nationality and "English" with any other language.
[1] "To that effect" or "along those lines" are yet other English phrases that do not stand in one-to-one correspondence with any idioms in Russian.
One thing I actually miss from themed channels is that they selected content for you, which is actually nice sometimes.
Yes, sometimes you just want to watch a specific show and you want to watch it now, and the streaming services are great for that.
But sometimes you just want to turn on the TV and watch something, anything, without really making a choice. I still have cable because it's included in the rent, and sometimes it's nice to just switch the channel to FXX or something and get maybe an old episode of the Simpsons, or a new episode, or maybe some Family guy, or maybe an old episode of some other comedy series, or maybe something completely new.
And that's nice and has value, but streaming services absolutely suck at that, because you always have to make a choice yourself with them.
'Airplane!' is something like 'Family Guy' - and please note, for cartoon fans; I'm not saying 'South Park', here.
There's an episode called '200'; (or something) where 'Family Guy' creator Seth MacFarlane discusses the show along with many of its voice actors, producers, etc.
He mentions that 'Family Guy' is absolutely not meant to be a high-brow humour show; and that part of the technique of the writing of 'Family Guy' is, in his own words; guided by how many jokes a minute they can get - how many times they can make the audience laugh.
If we have a casual pause in a show; someone looks to the camera, dead-pan, and just, quite seriously - says, 'penis' - out of the blue - I'm gonna laugh my ass off. I love intelligent humour as much as the next girl, but there is a nuance to some of the low-brow humour in 'Airplane!' that is just as complex to pull off effectively as a well-told and intelligent joke by Bill Maher, Norm MacDonald, or George Carlin.
We are talking about a 41-year-old film, in a genre (comedy) that famously doesn't age well. 'Airplane!' probably shouldn't come off well today, if it follows our previously established rules of comedy.
That being said, it's still hella funny.
There's a Family Guy episode where Peter does the opposite.
The golden era simpsons is some of the best comedy ever written. Sometime after season 10 or 11, quality dropped. I'd argue that golden era simpsons is definitely in a different league than southpark/family guy. However, after the golden era they are pretty comparable with, frankly, the simpsons being on the lower end of humor.
I've been debating with my friends about the Simpsons vs Family Guy/South Park. And while Family Guy/South Park definitely have their merits, the Simpsons is just in a different league. There's a great roundtable^[1] of Simpsons writers hosted by Conan O'Brien (who also was a writer). They talk about how with the Simpsons, no matter what, the family fundamentally cares about each other. Whereas with more modern animation and comedy as a whole, there's this extremely misanthropic feel. Bob's Burgers is probably one of the few shows that actively bucks this trend.
Of course The Simpsons is also just really funny. Family Guy/South Park are too, although I find that Family Guy resorts to shock humor far too much and South Park often repeats the same joke for the entire episode ad nauseum.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtJ28qOEG1g
There are two ‘schemas’ that illustrate the structure of the book: ‘Gilbert schema for Ulysses’ and ‘Linati schema for Ulysses’—Wikipedia has both, at least as concise tables. The first one was apparently used in defense of the book against the obscenity accusations. However, I'm afraid that they might make the thing too obvious compared to methodical exploration, so personally I avoid looking at them.
But it's widely known that Ulysses has parallels throughout to both Odyssey and the Bible, so I guess that knowledge might work as the first key.
> whether works of art should be considered greater on account of the complexity of their allusions
Not much sense in self-flagellation for not having knowledge that an author is alluding to—unless you feel that this knowledge is a general requirement. For example, English-language authors throughout the ages and to the modernity considered their readers to be familiar with the Bible, and freely used numerous motives and quotations—that I, of more-or-less atheistic upbringing, never could quite get on the fly, except for obvious ones. Finally decided to bite the bullet and get through the Bible just for this, which I've done in my language and will still have to do in English (frustratingly, the texts' authors didn't have much care for readers' aesthetic sense). However, when Marvel makes another movie that relies on the foreknowledge of the universe and comics conventions, I'll give it a miss.
The thing with the allusions, however, is that getting them is an enjoyment of its own, and a good enough reason for reading centuries-old classics before returning to modern stuff. Not everyone's cup of tea, obviously: as one critic wrote, you should only read books for enjoyment, not because you feel you owe something to your teacher. But if ‘Ulysses’ manages to weave its own narrative from what at that time was considered requisite knowledge for an educated man, combined with political themes, while showing off the author's command of the language and style—sure, I'll agree that it's cool. (Just like Sorokin is currently the best author in Russian simply because he can do what he wants with the language.) OTOH when ‘Family Guy’'s plot is a barrage of almost random citations from pop culture—eh, meh, doesn't look smart.
Here's a nice reminder of the context, that just recently appeared on HN (https://newcriterion.com/issues/2021/4/on-getting-poetry):
> With modernism and postmodernism, each of the arts turned against what had long been considered its defining technique. Just as composers rejected tonality and painters rejected representation, poets stopped writing in verse—the regular patterns of rhythm and rhyme that had been the essence of poetry in every culture since ancient times. In each genre, this rejection was initially experienced as a liberation that made new kinds of beauty possible. The first generation of modernists, and their audiences, knew the conventions that were being dispensed with, so they could appreciate the extent and purpose of the transgression.
> But once modernism itself became the canon, artists and audiences gradually lost the ability to extend or even fully appreciate its achievements, because they never mastered the conventions that modernism overthrew. This great deskilling, combined with the rise of mass media and the democratization of culture, resulted in a fracturing of the arts after World War II. In different ways, music, painting, and poetry each split into two: a cerebral, avant-garde version devoted to extending the modernist experiment; and a popular version that appealed to mass audiences without knowledge of the art’s traditions and conventions. The “serious” artists made a Tantalean bargain with the academy, which gave them a secure living and a measure of prestige while cutting them off from what any artist wants most—an actual audience.
> A single track will have 50 names on it between writing, production, studio performance, etc.
This is something I've noticed more and more lately. The list of credits on everything is huge. I happened to see an episode of Family Guy the other day. I haven't regularly watched it for years, but noticed on this one there were literally minutes of credits at the beginning. It went on and on and on. I don't know why this is or what it means, but it's interesting.
> I'm consistently shocked when talking with my friend just how little music matters in the music industry. The people who make the most look good, sound good, and hell they're crazy talented. But they aren't the people who've written the lyrics or the melodies that define our culture. We probably can't name those people.
I don't think this is a new phenomenon by any means. I was reading the other day about The Beatles and how, when they became big in the USA, the professional songwriters of the time were worried because these guys wrote their own songs. Apparently it was almost unheard of at the time.
>I wasn't excited to watch it, because I don't find McFarlane funny (as a writer/showrunner and especially not as an actor), and because I think I've only ever enjoyed maybe one sci-fi parody ever. (2 if you count MST3K as "sci-fi"..?)
Yeah, his comedy's a bit much for me most of the time. He's got some funny stuff, but it's usually in between a whole lot of meh stuff.
I was honestly expecting family guy in space or something. I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised and happy to be wrong.
>I would fully support McFarlane (or whomever is responsible for that "essence" in Orville) doing a dramatic space opera, hands down, no question. That would be one hell of a show.
I ended up looking up more about the show and to be fair, the show does actually have some long time star trek people involved. Johnathan Frakes(Riker), Robert Duncan Macneil(Tom Paris) and Brannon Braga(worked on Voyager and enterprise) directed a bunch of episodes. There were also a ton of cameos by star trek actors throughout the show. So there was definitely a bunch of people working on the show who had been involved in star trek.
Oddly enough, back to the video game world there's also a few examples of tribute games playing off nostalgia made by members of the original staff that don't hold up to the originals they're emulating, which also shows just having original staff members isn't all it takes to capture that old greatness.
I really don't get what's up with that...2012 or so, Netflix was suggesting movies I'd never heard of that I ended up loving. Now when I log in, it just demands I watch Family Guy (ugh) ...and starts auto-playing it, of course.
Reminds of a particular Family Guy episode, as it is the only time I have heard the term:
Dennis Miller: Now I don't want to go on a rant here, but America's foreign policy makes about as much sense as Beowulf having sex with Robert Fulton at the first Battle of Antietam. I mean, when a neo-conservative defenestrates, it's like Raskalnikov filibuster deoxymonohydroxinate.
Peter: What the hell does "rant" mean?
Co-incidently, I just watched a Family Guy episode where Peter and Tom Tucker shoot a skateboarding video, which ends up with Peter being attacked by a bear. The skit ends with a fake advert for www.shirt.gov
Obviously, they thought that there was no way someone could register shirt.gov... how wrong they were ;)
Man I wish more people understood this. Newsom hanging this on PG&E is so extraordinarily cynical. There's a need for some humility here. If we don't want power blackouts, we're going to need to spend a lot of money to create bigger breaks, put certain lines underground, etc. And that money is probably going to have to come from ratepayers (if you cut off the rate of return to the investors, you will have no more investors). Of course, ratepayers aren't going to like that very much, and the green energy advocates are going to have more difficulty pushing their agenda. No, better to just pray Warren Buffet bails you out. It's like an episode of Family Guy.
Me and my wife rewatch old Family Guy and Bobs Burger episodes, knocks us straight out.
Thr 2016 elections season was so darn good. Thats just my opinion as well. It became my favorite. I was never watching South Park like others did as it airs. I think shows like South Park you should have breaks on and then watch an episode or two on Hulu cause over time it does get tiresome. I can binge Family Guy and South Park but a lot gets lost compared to savoring it over time. Watched a lot of classic movies thanks to obscure Family Guy references.
I think this must be show-dependent. I, too, pay for the ad-free tier, and the most ad-like thing I've seen is a 2- or 3-second Family Guy is returning on <date> and a FOX logo interstitial at the start of streaming an episode of Family Guy. Can't recall seeing anything else across a number of shows.
Of all things there’s even a Family Guy episode about just that. They abolish the town government in a tea party/libertarian bid and just end up re-implementing everything to attain some modicum of order, agreement, and convenience for everyone.
This is a really interesting point.
I think there's some truth to the claim that Family Guy cut in on the "cartoon family relationships" and "cartoon family slapstick" markets, but I'd never quite grasped why the attempt to branch out failed so badly. Now that you point it out, Family Guy even did politics and current events (or at least picked at South Park's scraps), but it never really went in for the sort of quieter, knowing satire you see in The Onion.
That was something the Simpsons had gotten huge acclaim for (e.g. "Marge Vs The Monorail", "Last Exit to Springfield"), so it was an obvious place to look for a niche. But that's also really hard to maintain. The Onion itself has always had a lot of mediocre content, but that doesn't need to animate it's content and doesn't ask you to stare at one bit for 30 minutes straight. Heck, SNL has one of the best comedy writing teams anywhere and it has some seriously weak moments that need to be offset with celebrity guests, music, and rapid sketch changes.
The other thing that strikes me is that the near-realism of the Simpsons constrains the satire. Futurama's take on the 'eyePod' was hilarious, but the reason it worked so much better than the 'myPod' was that the sci-fi setting let them take the topic ludicrously far. "You Only Move Twice" (the supervillain Simpson's episode) was excellent and arguably satire, but it was also at the upper edge of how wacky the Simpson's universe ever gets. By Season Eight or so, it feels like The Simpsons had done a first-rate episode on almost every piece of small-town and nuclear-family life worth parodying, and couldn't break out of their constrained focus or their realistic setting far enough to find new fertile ground. Meanwhile, Futurama got to play around with Nixon and Mom's Friendly Robots and alien invaders and anything else that came to mind - plus with no one else in the sci-fi cartoon space they could save the satire for when they had something excellent to do.
I think it's because South Park has always been a vehicle to comment, usually specifically, on current events and popular culture. The world of South Park is really a sandbox for Trey and Matt to caricature whatever they're choosing to ream on that particular week.
The Simpsons, Futurama, when they address these kinds of issues, they feel like they're 'reaching' for it. Or, worse, just 'not trying'.
Someone else here mentioned The Simpsons, and the Family Guy, were much better at the time that they focused on the struggles of the families themselves.
I believe that this is because unlike South Park, where, even from the name, the town itself seems to be the focus. Which allows it to be moreso whatever they want it to be.
'The Simpsons' and the 'Family Guy', are meant to satirize, or at least revolve around, the daily struggles of the 'American Middle Class Family'.
When they don't, and they reach for 'current' events, which often usually feel dated by the episode release due to the extended 6-9 month production period, they seem stale and unfunny. South Park's 6-day production period, awesomely described in the fantastic documentary 'Six Days to Air', allows South Park to comment literally on things that happened the day before. It's incredibly hard to make that feel 'stale.' Really, worst-case scenario, South Park just doesn't seem 'funny' enough sometimes (this season hasn't been great), but definitely never 'irrelevant'.
The early seasons and episodes of the Simpsons are timeless. Many of them could've happened any time over the last three or four decades.
• 'Homer's Enemy' (S08E23) - A new employee at work gets jealous of Homer's 'easy' life.
• 'Mr. Plow' (S04E09) - Hijinks occur when Homer and Barney start competing snow removal businesses.
• 'Homer the Heretic' (S04E03) - Homer decides he doesn't need to attend church any more, and Marge doesn't like the example that demonstrates for the kids.
• 'You Only Move Twice' (S08E02) - Homer is offered a new work opportunity in a 'perfect' town. This episode does involve satire, but James Bond is such an old trope, and the films are still coming out, therefore it doesn't seem 'stale'.
None of these classic and fan favourite episodes rely on tropes of the era. They're still as funny today as when they were released. (Especially 'You Only Move Twice'. What a gem. Oh, Scorpio.)
Futurama, as well, does best when it focuses on it's sci-fi premise. It's supposed to be the future. We don't need comments about Apple products in there, we want the mind-bending 'Rick and Morty'-level plots of 'Roswell that Ends Well', or the genuine moments of emotion like Fry's dog at the end of 'Jurassic Bark'.
Again, it seems like early seasons of these cartoon sitcoms have a habit of sticking to their initial premise, and maybe perhaps the creator's visions. There's tons of reasons for this, but in 'The Simpsons' case, the death of Phil Hartman in 1998 drastically affected the show as a whole. I think a lot of the spirit was lost along with him. RIP, Troy McClure.
Your wording here suggests that the later episodes were simply rated lower because they were later. However, I think your point is that the later episodes got worse ratings for something beyond the writers. Certainly possible. Even if nothing else changed, it must be much more difficult to write a fresh, funny episode when 200+ episodes have already been done. There were also external factors which might have driven a change in the comedy of the show, the beginning of Family Guy, e.g.
Nothing lasts forever. Plain and simple.
I really dislike TV/Anime that never ends, seems to be the modus operandi for pretty much every mainstream show despite how bad the quality gets after 2-3 seasons.
Simpsons is a great showcase of the homogenization that every sitcom will go through given enough time. It starts out as a comedy with some wholesome family moments to bring it together but eventually every character is distilled to their most basic formula Homer -> Idiot who causes events to happen Bart -> Same as above Marge -> Straight man / Voice of reason or Satire of moralistic conservative adults depending on the situation Lisa -> same as marge but liberal piñata
Old episodes had genuine moments where you saw them become closer as family, now every episode is a hodgepodge of nonstop comedy.
Family Guy also went through this, especially after they got revived. The early episodes focused on the trials of the family with some goofy humor peppered throughout (Peter getting fired, Louis dealing with being a bored housewife) but now its just nonstop comedy.
Once you get syndicated it's not about making good episodes just churning out 26 more a year and cashing in that paycheck.
Even Steven Universe which has a very straightforward story with an end planned feels bloated with a bunch of filler episodes and lazy character development.
> a lot of books are tripe worse than TV shows and video games
I've never been a fan of this line of thinking. There are plenty of people who use critical thinking skills and participate in mentally stimulating activities throughout the day. When it's over, they just want to relax. So they watch shows like Family Guy, read basic action novels, or play Grand Theft Auto for an hour or two.
Why does everything have to be in pursuit of knowledge or something that contributes to a community?
Copyright infringement is still big in Youtube. It is flooded with stolen content. Big things The Simpson or Family guy or even full films. But also compilation channels from other Youtubers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRwTep1kvrw
No one dies so someone 10 years from now can watch a full episode of the family guy unimpeded for the duration of their commute.
The human toll is irrelevant to the conversation, what's relevant is whether risks taken are being taken knowingly - you cannot market a self driving vehicle whose functionality "is 2x better than any human being" while simultaneously stating in your legal language to protect yourself: don't take your hands off the wheel - that's bs.
"Our process whittled this list down to two names"
This reminds me of the Family Guy episode where Bonnie, the wife of quadriplegic Joe Swanson goes to Paris to get away from Joe and chooses a new partner - quadriplegic as well
Somewhere between Armin Tamzarian, the first season of South Park, the first season of Futurama, and the first season of Family Guy.
The Silver Age ended when The Simpson's Movie came out. Almost no animated series survives the first movie intact.
There's a lot of other examples, depending on how old you are.
"These included “Earshot,” an episode of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” that features a potential school shooter in a clocktower and was originally scheduled to air one week after the Columbine High School shootings occurred; “Mike and Molly” had a tornado-themed season finale episode postponed due to the real-life devastation incurred by the Oklahoma tornadoes; the “Reunion” episode of “Haven,” which featured gun violence occurring in a school, was due to air the very same day that the Sandy Hook shootings took place and was hastily pulled; “Family Guy” episode “Turban Cowboy” showed Peter plowing through the runners at the Boston Marathon, and when the bombings occurred a few months after it aired"
http://www.indiewire.com/2014/07/10-controversial-tv-episodes-pulled-from-air-274493/
There are also movies
"Space Camp was delayed back in 1986 following the Challenger explosion" "Trespass was originally called "The Looters" and (I think) it was set to show prior to the L.A. Riots. It got pushed to Christmas."
https://forum.dvdtalk.com/movie-talk/549045-movies-came-out-were-delayed-due-bad-timing-events.html
Rick And Morty has a great number of good "science" jokes, but really its more about general Sci-Fi tropes. (Time Travel, Multiverses, Clones, Aliens, and Androids aren't really "science" as much as they are about "Science fiction")
But the hardest thing for me was to get used to the straight up nihilism of Rick. True, there have been plenty of Nihilistic "protagonists" in other shows: Peter Griffin in Family Guy, Eric Cartman from South Park, Homer Simpson (depending on the season of course).
But Rick is different: while the other characters are arguably Nihilistic due to ignorance, Rick purposefully and specifically pursues the "I don't care" attitude and gets away with it due to his intelligence (while other characters in other shows seem to get away with it due to literally dumb luck).
That difference continuously pisses me off in Rick and Morty, and as such its difficult for me to enjoy a lot of the episodes.
Nothing against the fanbase or anything: I recognize that Rick and Morty is a huge following, and the enormous lines at McDonalds for the special Rick and Morty Sauce just a few days ago demonstrates that Rick and Morty are the new "mainstream" cartoon. But its apathetic and malicious main character really grates on me, and I personally an unable to enjoy it as much as everyone else seems to.
I've been tuning into an episode South Park, Family Guy, American Dad or The Simpsons LIVE recently. They look like straight torrent uploads so curious how they are getting around the filters... They have ads, so money must be being made for anyone to pursue this.
A running gag from the animated TV show family guy.
As someone with no experience in that region, and as someone whose taste is much more toward the satirical (Seinfeld, Family Guy, Simpsons), I have a hard time trying to recall anything satirical in KotH.
Instead, I consider KotH to be similar to the Cosby Show, Roseanne, or even All in the Family - a respectful look at the type of family that was not historically portrayed in TV or the movies.
Exactly.
In addition, I am thinking of the many television shows starring educated urban people's educated urban problems, or how often the lower classes, when they are represented at all, are treated with either some condescension (Family Guy, etc.) or are "sensitively" portrayed from a removed anthropological perspective (Friday Night Lights).
500,000 followers puts his viewership on par with, say, "Morning Joe" with Joe Scarborough Mika Brzezinski. (Rough numbers, here.)
A little research. Poking around I see "Family Guy" has been pulling, say, $250k for a 30 second spot. They've got, say, five times "Morning Joe's" ratings. So let's say "MJ" gets $50k/spot to access (influence) their 500k viewers. Super rough numbers, to reiterate, but I bet it's of this scale given what the hosts make.
So.
$80k doesn't seem that out-of-line to market directly towards a very narrowly defined demographic of that size. If you can accumulate such an audience, it's probably reasonable to compare your impact to that of a moderately popular TV show. And if you can make that impact with basically zero overhead... Well. Seems reasonable that you'd be raking in some cash.
reminded me of a family guy episode where Carter Pewterschmidt gets scammed by Nigerians and flies to Nigeria to get his money back and eventually decides to donate the money as he sees the people there really need it, or something like that.
Don't get me started about pre-widescreen episodes of Family Guy. I don't know how they ruined them, but they're all ruined with horrible, burned-in interlacing artefacts.
I grew up upper-lower-middle class in a dying manufacturing town near Chicago so the The Simpsons, Married with Children, Roseanne always felt like home.
I can't agree with the article tho. I still see that same grasping in current shows like Better Call Saul, Shameless (which, aside from Season 2, is fantastic), and, in a different way, The Big Bang Theory and Silicon Valley.
Most comedies are just joke delivery mediums with paper thin walls. But nothing has changed, shows have always been a reflection of their creators/runners and the networks fund people who've had hits.. Family Guy was a hit on DVD/[adult swim]? Ok! Order two more joke delivery vehicles from Seth MacFarlane!
James L. Brooks had a string of hits with a strong emotional core. So after he helped get The Simpsons on the air it made sense that he essentially forced the 20-something writers to build the show around an emotional/sentimental core instead of letting it to devolve into a gag factory out of the gate.
1 of those shows is still on TV. Sopranos ended all the way back in 2007.
Anyway, from a business standpoint only having 2 or 3 good shows mean people get out of the habit. Fox fed viewers from Simpsons into American Dad and Family guy, but when most channels are filled with junk people got out of the habit. When The walking Dead has a bad season there is nothing keeping people tuning into AMC.
Think filler B TV like Roseanne or Home Improvement the kind of show where the mass of humanity don't just turn them off even if nobody is lining up for a new episode.
PS: It's also all the same formulas and if you like it that's great for you. But, we are missing a lot of the off the wall TV like the twilight zone or MST3k.
Hello, Hacker News! I think I have to say several words about the origin of this.
I like several shows. Like Family Guy, Simpsons, Dr. Who, and some others. I watch them occasionally, and having hard times remembering what was the last episode I watched, and if there are some more.
That's why I came out with this simple CLI. It let's me track episodes I watch and shows new stuff that came out. I like it a lot, and I thought that maybe someone else would also like this idea.
Appreciate any questions or help with it!
Nice resort model. Where are the gun emplacements to fend off the pirates?
The article also neglected to mention another difference between, say, California and Texas: employers don't own your every stray thought in California. Hard to get smart people to work for you under dumb conditions.
What, you don't want to come work in Petopia??? (or whatever it was in the "Family Guy" episode where the dad finds out he has the right to make his house into its own country)
I've noticed Family Guy do this quite a lot too. In an episode I saw recently (season 4 episode 4). Meg is turned down by a boy at school and ends up having a makeover at the mall (plot 1). Meanwhile, Peter, Joe, Cleveland and Quagmire try to stop the Clam going out of business and discover Karaoke as a solution (plot 2). So they decide to start a band but their first gig goes badly and so Peters family step in and put on a good performance (plot 3). Peter's family then go on tour and Meg, now the attractive lead singer of the band, lets success go to her head (plot 4). Meanwhile Brian tries to suppress his racism (subplot to plot 4).
The Firefly series got enough support (in the form of written letters - this was pre-kickstarter) to be made into movie after a comically botched distribution through normal channels (The first seasons episodes were aired out of order in random time slots on Fox. It never had a weekly time that was consistent. This was the only season, natch.)
Family Guy also had a similar fate, but not because of a botched launch, but because its audience existed, but did not consume television through mainstream sources. It was canceled after 2.5 seasons and then went on to become the best selling animated DVD series. Fox brought it back the next year.
I think my favorite part about the Simpsons is how you can date people by which key episodes them remember. For me, it's the X-Files episode, or the Guatemalan Insanity Pepper. But for people a lot younger than me, they remember totally different episodes. I think there's just an age range where the jokes are targeted.
I do think the modern version is just sort of more modern. With so many competing cartoons like Adventure Time, Family Guy, and other (better) ones, the overall humor has just evolved. Simpsons I think has tried to evolve too, but can't evolve enough to really be a solid show because doing so would destroy the fan base it does have.
Perhaps best to think of it as the "Oracle" of television cartoon comedy =)
While this is a serious issue and everyone will have their varying opinions on it...
I really want Seth MacFarlane to make an episode of Family Guy based on this (The show is based in Rhode Island).
As a category, anime has some unique characteristics you don't (generally) find in other TV or film categories:
1) Strong user/viewer affinity for the category. Generally speaking, you don't find that your typical Grey's Anatomy viewer is a "medical drama fan," who seeks out other medical dramas at every opportunity. Likewise, a rabid Family Guy viewer is probably not an "animated comedy fan," barring a very tiny and borderline-insignificant segment who is. They might be fair-weather fans, but their consumption of those categories is ad-hoc and show-dependent. Anime fans may come to the category seeking a particular show -- Cowboy Bebop, Attack on Titan, or what have you -- but many of them stick around for anime as a category. Someone who likes Law & Order isn't going to seek out other legal procedurals, but someone who likes a mecha show is going to look for more mecha shows.
2) Anime is underrepresented on TV/movie services like Netflix, or in other "mainstream" TV/movie sites and aggregators. (That said, there are anime-specialist players in these markets, such as Crunchyroll and Anime Network.)
3) High fan engagement online, more so than with many other categories of film or TV. Thus, a more addressable user base.
Of course, these factors can also work against you. As another commenter has pointed out, the characteristics that make anime unlike other genres also makes bridging the gap between anime and other genres very challenging. Anime companies are usually in the business of addressing the TAM in the anime category; they seldom find success using anime as a beachhead to attack TV or movies in general. Not saying it can't happen, or that it's never happened. But it's difficult.
The US is not lagging behind. When it comes to marijuana liberalisation, it is definitely leading the way. With the exception of Netherlands, attitudes to marijuana is pretty strict in Europe. The US has the most pot smokers/capita by a long shot.
Also, Hollywood movies seem to portray it as some cool party drug, that hippies and pseudo-intellectuals use. The drug is present in most American Pie-style movies, many sitcoms and animated series like Family Guy.
Personally I believe marijuana going mainstream is an engineered phenomena. Hollywood is able to create perceptions and demands where none was before. Older generations weren't miserable all the time because they couldn't smoke pot. New generations found out about it by the marketing.
Joking about things that are in despicable in reality is commonplace. The TV show "Family Guy" features a pedophile as a main character. Do you think this means the audience or producers feel this is normal and acceptable?
If you weren't aware, Family Guy is a fairly popular low-brow humor cartoon TV show. It's in the same category as The Simpsons or South Park.
I'll give a dissenting opinion. I've loved the Comedy Central reboot. The material is quick and snappy in a way that the earlier seasons weren't, packing in rapid-fire jokes. And it still consistently throws in bits of real science and mathematics, like the famous brain-swapping problem and solution. The movies were uneven, but season six hit a new and sustained peak starting with the fourth episode.
I often felt like the earlier seasons got too caught up in their own worldbuilding and forgot the funny. "The Why of Fry" was my personal least favorite, retconning the entire premise of the show and Nibbler's nature, and straining on a single joke of Fry's stupidity for the entire episode. Other low points included the forced Amy-Kif relationship that had little comedy content and less meaning, Leela's retconned family, and any time filled by Zapp Brannigan's one-note attempts at jokes. Futurama can't credibly do gross-out or shock humor in a world where Family Guy cranks it up to eleven every week.
Futurama is best as a joke turbine playing off the future setting, and IMO strains for misguided impact whenever it brings up how Fry's family lost a son. I never bought in to the heartstring-tugging. The characters are too broadly drawn and fantastical to care about, unlike the Simpsons. The Comedy Central seasons seem to have figured this out, realizing that it's too late in the game for any more meaningful character material. Instead, the show has seriously stressed the pacing and density of the comedy, which for me really shines now.
As someone who wrote a humor book and am currently working on another, this topic fascinates me. For the last month, I've been analyzing jokes from different comedians, looking for the root of why they're funny.
As I see it, humor is something that ventures outside of our own "world," yet relates to it. Someone else's inside joke isn't funny to you because it doesn't relate to the "world" you live in. This is also true of referential humor like Family Guy. If you don't know the reference, it's generally not funny.
From analyzing about 30 jokes, these are some of the repeating themes I've come across: - Change the context of something (by far the most common) - Taking a phrase literally - Explain something that doesn't need to be explained. - Under exaggerate. - Over exaggerate. - Connect two unrelated things. - Say something predictable and then take what would have been the cliched ending to an extreme.
The core of these elements and many others is that you're taking a shared view of something and manipulating it, whether through changing the context, taking an element to an extreme, or one of the other numerous ways.
Everyone knows if something is funny on a subconscious level, but few can explain why they laughed at something. Much like how most people know if they like a movie or not, but can't articulate the exact elements that caused them to enjoy the story (unless they've read several books on screenwriting/story telling). I'd be very interested in seeing the results from this study.
Not movies. But definitely something that does not need your full attention - something that you don't mind tuning in and out of. This would mostly be TV shows - Simpsons, Family Guy, Two and a half men, How I met your mother. Seinfeld was great for this.
I mostly agree with what you are saying, and I don't feel like it is in conflict with anything that I said in my comment. One point about our trash - is it "simply thrown on a big pile", or is it "strategically centralized so that future people can effectively recycle it when it becomes economically feasible"? In a post apocalyptic wasteland, you will find me making runs to the "grocery store" that is the trash dump.
I think it appealed too much to "the masses" to be enjoyed by "sophisticated" people. And I think that the satire bits were much too sparing to really be absorbed by "unsophisticated" watchers. No one under the age of 18 that I talked with has any idea that this movie is a "withering criticism of where we are". Here's why:
I do agree with you that the movie had satiric elements, and I agree that it pointed out the specific issues that you say it pointed out. But if you watch the movie, these issues are only briefly mentioned, they are not explored or analyzed. If the film was pared down to the satire bits, it would be about 7 minutes long. The plot of the film was Luke Wilson the time traveler saving the world, the serious satire elements were the setting. Well if the plot doesn't get the message through, we can use the characters, right? Unfortunately, the low IQ people in the film were incapable of talking about their problems in a sympathetic way that most people can understand. Few people recognized that the characters were actually caricatures, because they were so dumb and happy about their lot in life. When you watch Schindler's List, do you relate to the characters that are unsympathetic oppressors or to the characters that are sympathetic and oppressed?
My friends and family were effected much more by the satire in Planet of the Apes, which is very similar movie to Idiocracy. The main thrust of both plots is "a hero saves the day," and the satire elements are mostly setting. PotA works as satire because some of the ape and human characters had problems that they were struggling with, just like you and I! None of the lower IQ people in Idiocracy was struggling with anything; the "dystopia" was NOT a nightmare for them, because they had IQs too low to express any anguish and garner any sympathy.
I think the movie would have made an excellent short film, and I think Luke Wilson would have been brilliant in it. It would have made a fantastic Family Guy episode for those that enjoy Family Guy. It failed as a feature length film which is disappointing from such an effective artist as Mike Judge.
The use of RF frequencies to broadcast TV content is by far the best way to deliver that content for a certain subset of programs that cover live events for huge audiences[1]. Serving that stuff over IP would be a real challenge. I'd prefer it if we could keep a few RF broadcast channels around but move all the Family Guy and Top Gear re-runs onto on-demand IP based systems.
[1] Things like major sporting events, Saturday night talent show finals, large scale news events e.g. 9/11, Christmas specials and key episodes of certain soap operas.
It's also insane the amount of gore and violence allowed on TV and in movies, but show a little skin and you get fined.
The reason Family Guy has so many fight scenes is to prove how stupid the FCC's regulations on violence are compared to nudity.
Advertising needs to be turned upside in the DVR/Digital streaming era. Imagine if the show you watched ran ad-free, and instead simply had a 'Sponsored By' section on the shows start page (basically a newly designed 'landing page' for each tv show). Then we viewers would simply choose to watch the ad's when we/if we wanted. And even if we didn't watch an ad, just seeing a Tide logo on that page would cause some to buy their product ('cool they sponsor Family Guy...' for example).
The thing that advertisers don't seem to understand is that we consumers are actually interested in the right ad's. I would choose to watch the new trailer for Game of Thrones - Season Two for example. Or an add for the new Honda Element, if I were shopping or just curious what the new model looked like.
All the sponsored by ads could be google-style customized to the viewer, and the view-rate would likely be higher than it is now where I DVR skip pretty much all ad's since there is no easy way for me to know what is being shown.
On top of all that, advertisers would be able to know exactly how many people were actually watching their ads. They could even add in interactive 'like/dislike' voting to further determine the effectiveness of the ad.
I thought of all this 5-6 years ago when DVR's really got popular. It seemed to me an obvious way to 'evolve' TV, and I'm pretty surprised something like this hasn't already happend. I guess it's expecting too much from an industry that is used to just shoveling ads at us from all angles, the idea of 'choice' is probably pretty scary/imposible for them.
Maybe this is the way Apple intends to crack TV?
This is great info (that you gave in a reply about production costs), but I'm very interested in something which you may have some knowledge on.
All of the production you're talking about is live (as in using real people, locations and equipment.) My question is, what about digital cartoon production, wouldn't the cost of producing a digital cartoon show or movie be dramatically less than the equivalent length live show or movie? There are no sets, cameras, costumes, or natural location permits in cartoons. On top of this, voice actors more than often portray multiple characters, you do not need an actor for each person, etc.
Lets take the show South Park for example, which differs from cartoons like The Simpsons, Spongebob and Family Guy in that South Park is produced completely in house, they produce each episode from scratch in under a week I believe using various digital production methods.
You still need the basic essentials, script, storyboards, sound, voice actors, audio recording equipment, etc; but I (and I've had some small experience here) would think the cost of the equipment needed to put out a digital cartoon, of tv quality and length, would be significantly lower than the equivalent live tv show.
Also, I stress that I'm talking about digital cartoons, not traditional animation which can easily take months (tv) / years (movie) to produce. I've produced many digital cartoons myself, but not quite at the level of quality that would be required for a tv show (I will give examples if asked.) From my experiences a very small group of people with almost no money can produce a high quality cartoon in a reasonable around of time. Time being the main issue which, in animation, can be solved with more people, and overtime is reduced because of digital software.
Marketing and distribution would still be the same more than likely, but there is still plenty of room to innovate there online; take Louis C.K.'s recent example of making a lot of money (over a million dollars?) selling his stand-up routine directly to the consumers.
I'm very interested in your thoughts on all this, especially if there are production costs I've ignored (for cartoons) that would even things out. Basically, do you think a cartoon with the production value of South Park, can be produced for significantly less money than the equivalent length tv show or movie?
I think this is something that can be done (independently produced cartoon show at the level of South Park), but really hasn't been tried yet online (a show that pushes boundaries and talks about critical topics,) at all. I know it can certainly be produced faster and adapt to changes more quickly than traditional live tv.
I'm a person who basically gets frustrated thinking of all the people right now who are waiting for The Daily Show, Colbert and South Park to "say something" about SOPA or other major topics, as if those shows are our voice (which they are the best example of on tv sadly.) In the end though, they work for Viacom, so even though people think those shows are pushing boundaries (which they are) just remember, they can only say so much. Where as an independently produced show released online can say pretty much whatever they want and can respond to topics IMMEDIATELY. Thoughts? :)
Don't forget that this was the era when Fox also cancelled Family Guy and Futurama. Both of these series were able to be resurrected due to their DVD sales and syndication numbers. Fox made a lot of mistakes during that time, but were just learning about the secondary sales potential for their shows. I'd like to think that a similar set of shows would be able to stick around longer now. Those shows were able to be resurrected easily because they are animated. Firefly, not so much. But another show (Arrested Development) cancelled by Fox in that era is getting resurrected by Netflix, which while not straight to consumer is more direct than through the studios.
Also, Joss Whedon (and the rest of Hollywood) I think learned a lot about distributing directly to the consumer with Dr. Horrible's Sing-along Blog. I think that this grand experiment was a good template for future direct-to-consumer productions.
Unfortunately, you still have to deal with the problems of initially funding large movies. I can imagine a system where instead of having dedicated studios, you have smaller one-off production companies. These companies would then be funded VC style by funds that seek to mitigate their risk by diversifying their pool of movies. You could fund a few flops, so long as every now and again an Avatar comes along.
This linked response discusses several problems with this meta-analysis, and the fact that most other meta-analyses have found no effect: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20192554
"Several recent meta-analyses, examining outcome measures most closely related to serious aggressive acts, found little evidence for a relationship between violent video games and aggression or violence. In a new meta-analysis, C. A. Anderson et al. (2010) questioned these findings. However, their analysis has several methodological issues that limit the interpretability of their results. In their analysis, C. A. Anderson et al. included many studies that do not relate well to serious aggression, an apparently biased sample of unpublished studies, and a "best practices" analysis that appears unreliable and does not consider the impact of unstandardized aggression measures on the inflation of effect size estimates. They also focused on bivariate correlations rather than better controlled estimates of effects. Despite a number of methodological flaws that all appear likely to inflate effect size estimates, the final estimate of r = .15 is still indicative of only weak effects."
Meta-analyses are usually either a cheap way to get a well-cited publication or a way to impose one's biases on other people's research. They're rarely as useful as some people would like to think, and the issue a meta-analysis reviews is rarely as simple as some would like to think.
That said, I've got an almost 8 year old, and I obviously don't let him play videos games or watch TV shows with explicit violence (blood, gore, realistic violence, etc.). So for example Mario Kart is okay, but Family Guy is not (they often show bloody violence).
>>Fox's president of affiliate sales Mike Hopkins told the Wall Street Journal. "If this works, you're going to see a lot more content online."
And if this doesn't work, you're going to see a lot more content online. These companies just don't get it. It has less to do with money, and more to do with ease of viewing. If I want to watch Family Guy or Glee the day after it airs, I will google "family guy episodes online free" and find plenty of free options. Or I will go to torrent sites. Fox just lost me as a customer. I gladly watch the shows legally on Hulu when that's the easiest way.
> Those who enjoy Fox shows such as Family Guy, Glee, or The Simpsons will soon have to wait an extra eight days if they want to watch new episodes online
Oh, no, not a whole eight days! I'll literally be a full week behind the latest pop culture phenomenae!
This was actually a Family Guy episode. Brian wrote a million selling self help book that was 1/3 blank where you were supposed to list your hopes and dreams.
I don't have much first-hand experience with Blu-rays, but I wonder if this kind of bad compression is a common thing?
Fortunately it's not too common, but it's more common than one would like. This isn't unique to Blu-rays either; it happened a lot with DVDs. Various problems that I've seen are:
1. Improperly done telecine (e.g. telecining two different parts of the frame at different rates, more common in animation).
2. Badly done framerate-changing (Robot Chicken DVDs).
3. Completely borked interlacing (Family Guy first season DVDs).
4. Bad encoders that can't deal with massive bitrate peaks well (Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu R1 DVDs, see http://i43.tinypic.com/105b8rk.png).
The primary problem with Blu-rays is a lack of source quality, not these kinds of mistakes: a lot of Blu-rays simply don't have any detail beyond SD because their source material is horrible (examples: Cowboy Bebop: The Movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind).
KA-POW!
Feels like that episode of family guy (post-apocalypse) when the town destroys all weapons only to be destroyed by mutated stewies.
> Today, they're the butt of every joke.
I think this trend probably peaked a few years ago (Family Guy is a good example.) You can actually see it reversing if you watch King of the Hill: the earliest episodes generally show Hank as a small minded redneck, whereas later episodes portray him as a lone voice of sanity.
Anyways, if you look outside of comedies, there are plenty of masculine male leads in popular shows (Jack Bauer comes to mind.) As for race, I can't even think of a popular drama where the male lead is black (and the other characters aren't.) But maybe I just don't watch enough TV.
Apart from agreeing with all the reasons below why this won't work - both technical and the blazingly obvious - and still being an ardent lover of all types of tech... I think that in the 21st century where all our labour saving devices seem to take all our time to operate, control, log in/out, update, check and generally fiddle with so that we have next to zero free time.. isn't there a certain pleasure being missed here in taking a walk to your corner store, saying 'Hi' to a passing neighbour and grabbing a few groceries before getting back home in time to catch the latest episode of Family Guy? Isn't this just another reason for us to stay trapped in front of the computer never leaving the house? /me ducks under a flying car piloted by a pig
It would seem rjurney's point is that more options may have lower utility.
Suppose there are two viewers. Both are fans of Family Guy. One viewer is exposed to one episode and the other viewer is denied all access to Family Guy. The first viewer, however, is subsequently denied access to Family Guy after viewing the first episode.
If the first viewer were allowed to see all Family Guy episodes, she would eventually begin to tire of it. Each additional episode would lessen her demand for another episode. But that's only after seeing a large number of episodes. After one episode, the demand may actually be higher than having seen no episodes at all.
And if denied demand has negative utility -- the more you want something you can't have, the more it annoys you -- then that person who has seen one episode is actually worse off than the second viewer who has seen no episodes.
That stops being true at the point where each additional episode begins having declining returns, which could occur at a point after five episodes.
So the first 5 episodes of family guy plus every other piece of content on hulu is better than nothing how?
Just curious how we're not supposed to envy you...
Don't envy us too much - they only give us 5 episodes of family guy, and this pains us greatly. We're flipping out over here, 'first try is free' and all that. :(
In my personal experience, internet advertising gets more annoying as technology and bandwidth improves. As for TV, it's consistently as annoying as it has always been. (except for the in-show layering on the bottom of the screen) There was a Family Guy episode that made fun of that. Pure gold!
That's actually a good question. I watch a limited number of shows, and I wonder if simply buying the DVD's of a program would turn out to be cheaper than actually subscribing.
Edit: I mean I've seen boxsets in BestBuy for as little as $25 and they're shows I watch.
If I had all the series of Simpsons, Futurama, Mythbusters, Family Guy and American Dad I believe from then on I believe I would rather use the monthly subscription fee (about $150 here for all the channels we want; TMN is great to have as they're free of charge for a monthly fee, I get all the recent Stargate and Dexter episodes and most of the big movies not too long after they're out for rental) for buying more boxsets and movie rentals.
I like not choosing what I'm watching. I like flicking onto the simpsons and watching an episode I'd probably have never picked by myself... or you know one that's actually from a new season!
However, with like 40 airings of the family guy episode "patriot games" in the 5 days running up to the super bowl, I seriously wished I had another method of getting TV then.
Again, I don't like watching TV on my computer. My wife and myself can get through a few episodes of a show online, however IMO nothing beats a TV. That's why I watch all my shows through my 360 on my TV. I don't like being able to watch TV wherever I want, because it doesn't feel right, plus I don't feel like ripping my surround sound out and moving room with it!
"Critical and relevant?" You can say that about pretty much any joke that states the obvious. I could call the I'm a Mac ad that has Hodgman not saying "Vista" critical and relevant, because it's got a grain of truth. But that commercial's a commercial, not a comedy show, and if The Simpsons had made a similar joke it would have been below their standards. (Also in its defense: the ad is far more polished.)
What you call inaccuracies seemed to me just like exaggerations, something every comedian uses.
The difference between good comedy and bad is how the exaggeration's used. The best exaggerations lie with the unexpected: I like using Monty Python's Spanish Inquisition bit as an example. Nobody does expect the Spanish Inquisition, which is what's so funny. Or take Carlin's Seven Words. The words are all so shocking and he goes by them so often that part of the humor's greatness is that by the end he's succeeded in making those words sound mundane, commonplace. But neither sketch stops there. The Spanish Inquisition sketch goes on with the repeated mantra, Seven Words makes a set of brilliant jokes over the the top of the message: "These words are no different. This is all ludicrous."
This was more an instance of lazy humor. It was The Simpsons repeating the same general idea - "Apple is overpriced and people love it anyway" - without a hint of cleverness. They bludgeon people with the idea. Some of the soundbites they give are apt for people to take and mock Apple with, but that's not going to make them any more accurate. (There were a few hints of clever - "myPhonies" was a clever name pun even if the concept was poor - but I can't forgive The Simpsons if in 6 minutes they only had one or two clever moments. Not when the general quality of the humor is so poor.)
The whole thing made me laugh more than the simpsons movie.
That is an incredibly low bar. The Simpsons Movie was an example of The Simpsons at its worst, relying on cliche and repeated memes rather than ever creating genuinely funny humor.
I think this is mainly because they chose a good target. I have mixed feelings about apple which makes excellent products but is also surrounded by a consumerist hype which makes me feel uneasy. The hype is not very much criticised, at least not around me. I see people generally critical of well-marketed brands suddenly buying Ipods and Iphones.
The hype's incredibly criticized. Usually it's by anti-Apple people, and usually it's their only argument, which just makes the rift worse. When I argue why I use a Mac to a group of Linux-using coders, they respond by dismissing my ideas and saying, "You're only using it because of the commercials." Which in turn pisses me off and makes me less willing to listen to their arguments, now or in the future. The Simpsons is doing the same thing: they're not making good arguments. They're just blindly lobbing around parody with neither rhyme nor reason. It's beneath them. And I've already had people start quoting that at me - "myPhonies! See, Apple's for queeros who like shitty things!" - and I hate it. It's such a waste of time and it kills what might be a perfectly good argument.
I can see where you're coming from. I just think that The Simpsons could have skewered Apple much more effectively than they did. And that failure to craft a good series of jokes annoys me. I don't like that Family Guy is better-written than The Simpsons. That feels unnatural to me.
Yech.
The jokes didn't refer at all to the things that make people use Apple. It took the fact that Apple was popular and actually makes good-looking products, and used that as the basis of insults. That's the laziest sort of humor: joking without actually providing criticism.
It starts with the fake names. Mapple and Steve Mobs. myPod and myPhone. These aren't funny. The Simpsons could absolutely just use Apple's name and get away with it, if it's obviously parody. That joke adds nothing, and therefore by the rules of comedy ought to be removed. Anything bad brings down the good things.
Lisa runs into the store and points out Apple products and a parody of the Genius bar, which has never been funny. Apple Geniuses don't let the title go to their head, really. I've dealt with them a lot. They're smart and fun and they know what they're talking about, and they're perfectly willing to admit that Genius is just a bit of silly marketing. So that's another bad joke. Then we see the requisite "Comic Book Guy is sloppy" joke: predictable and not funny. That's the first 20 seconds.
Now we see Homer begging to get a computer. How is that funny? The Brainiac tells him that it's powered by dreams and imagination. I guess that's supposed to be a joke about how Apple is all talk and no play? Because that's not something that Apple's ever done, and they keep getting made fun of for it, and it's a lazy joke. Sample page: http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/. Apple markets its products only by mentioning features. On the splash page alone it mentions four things. If you talk to a genius, they are entirely pragmatic: they tell you exactly why Apple computers are better than other ones. This is another lazy, unfunny joke that only works if you already dislike Apple, which is the easiest audience on the planet.
The joke about a glowing computer being turned off - what the hell does that mean? The Wii glows when it's turned off. My Mac doesn't do anything when it's off. In fact, Apple computers tend to have fewer blinking lights than other computers. So there's another lame joke, and we're 40 seconds done with this shitty set of jokes.
The iPhonies is clever, but it's false. People don't get headphones to pretend like they use Apple products. Nobody does that. Furthermore, a cheap iPod shuffle costs less than a hundred dollars. Apple isn't pretentious and rich. It's high-end, and very rarely makes low-end products, but it's usually got surprisingly reasonable prices. So there's a bad joke based on a false premise that nobody actually believes.
Now we have a lengthy Krusty sequence that's unfunny. Seriously, now The Simpsons is like Family Guy. It makes stupid, irrelevant cameos just to carry the joke along. The difference is that Simpsons cameos are all Simpsons characters, and none of them are funny.
Krusty's comment about small movies: I saw the first season of Lost on my iPod on an airplane, and the screen worked for me. Plus, when you put a movie in your iPod it means you also have it on iTunes, on your computer, so it's a win-win. Apple's been steadily increasing screen size: look at the iPhone and iPod touch. Oh. We also get a tasteless Jewish joke here.
Steve Mobs appears, and people say that he's a genius and knows what they want. I guess this is supposed to be a joke. But from my experience, Jobs comes up with pretty ingenious products and they tend to be ones that I want. How is this funny? I like my computer, my iPod, and the iTunes music store.
Steve Mobs calls himself "insanely great." Jobs, on the other hand, is rarely self-masturbatory like that. So it's another joke that plays to Apple haters with no context. Next comes Bart, who gets to insult people and call Mac user losers. He also says that Jobs is gay. That's not only poorly stereotyped, that's crude and offensive.
People don't get Mac products to look cool. They get them because the Mac is incredibly delightful to use. I love my Macbook. It's an amazing tool. I don't care what people think about it: I care what I think about it. And I love it. I also happen to be straight.
Comic Book Guy reenacts the 1984 commercial, which is nice, but Futurama did it much better. The Simpsons is stealing from its child shows.
Then there's a pointless joke about how Jobs was fired and brought back. Yeah, because Apple culture just hasn't changed since then, and because Apple had the same image in the 80s that it does now. Jobs began the current Apple feel when he returned, and he's introduced good product after good product. The firing joke is a slightly higher-scale stupid joke, but it's a stupid joke.
Earbud-flaying. Not funny. Bart trying to escape with a computer. Not sensible, not funny.
The twins make a "hate Lisa" cameo. Yawn. They don't like her music. Yawn. They like her for her myPod. Kids don't actually... do that. iPods are so incredibly commonplace nowadays. There's a joke to be made about that. It wasn't made.
I love Itchy and Scratchy, but they're out of good ideas for them. And this one was extended way too far. See? Even the not-anti-Apple parts are bad.
The myBill is an outdated joke and it's been fixed. And what's the joke? That Apple charges 99 cents for a song? That's pretty cheap. 1200 dollars for 1212 songs is a good deal. But no: it's funny because Apple products are extremely expensive, right? 1200 dollars is so much! Never mind that buying the same amount of songs, say, as CDs from Wal-Mart would cost much more.
Also, buying songs from iTunes adds itself directly to your credit bill. You're charged instantly. No bill. That's the iPhone's thing.
The USB drive bit is clever. The underwater headquarters? Not so much. It's cliche and stupid. The big joke is that Apple has made the name Cupertino famous as where Apple comes from. There's a joke to be made there. This doesn't make it, because it's funnier to think that Steve Jobs is underwater like every other rich person on The Simpsons.
Steve Jobs is Googling himself! Never mind that Google loads fast and the page jobs is looking for has already loaded, so the delay is only there for the "requisite punch line set-up time" that makes jokes less funny. Or that Jobs has never been an attention-getter. He wears the same outfit every day! He's quietly married and his kids stay out of the news! Again! This is only a joke that's funny if you know nothing about Apple and already hate its products.
Steve Jobs knows all the Apple product users. Not sure why this is unfunny.
"Our real policy is no refunds." Only, Apple does offer refunds, for a long time after purchase. And Lisa bought 1200 songs! Why does she deserve a refund? This is blind Apple-hate without any reasoning.
The final joke enforces this. Lisa's in an iPod costume handing out flyers. Apple doesn't do this. Never has. Its entire thing is rational minimalism. It's why Geniuses aren't given specific tasks and are allowed to just wander the store. It keeps their morale high and helps customers. So this is just a bad joke based on a premise - Apple says think differently but doesn't actually think differently - that doesn't exist. Apple does think differently. So there's another bad joke.
This is terrible writing. It's the worst Simpsons clip I've ever seen. And I'd think that if they were bashing Windows in the same way.
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I love anti-Apple jokes if they're well done. The "Don't Get A Mac" video still cracks me up. I think that most anti-Apple jokes, however, are crude and poorly-done and just attempts to play up to people who hate Macs already. The Simpsons should be better than this.
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Also, this isn't at all relevant hacker news, and it's not that intellectually interesting.
In the case of youtube it seems most copyright owners tacitly accept the presence of their material, probably because they recognize the promotional value.
It's a weird situation now where people casually link to illegal material, like a Family Guy episode or a clip from Office Space, and nobody even blinks.
I think the article gets it wrong at the end. Family Guy got resurrected because Cartoon Network's Adult Swim played the old episodes almost every night. This got a lot more of Family Guy's would-be target audience interested in the show. It was that interest that woke Fox up to bring back Family Guy.
The same thing is happening now to Futurama. The formula appears to be to put shows on networks during time slots where their target audience already is and where it doesn't have to compete with unrelated content. Who knew?
Great point... The roles are VERY different:
In film, the voice actor is often used for marketing (ie Jack Black in Panda kung-fu film)
In TV, they tend to really drive the show (Family Guy, Futurama, etc)
In video games, it's a complete non-factor unless you're John Madden.
On Valentine's Day this year my son called me from the passenger seat of his best friend's grandmother's Lexus SUV.
"What's masturbation Dad?"
I had an answer. I'd been thinking about it for two years. Just allowing the proper answer to surface.
This is near and dear for me. I'm in the process of introducing Online Courses for parents to learn methods of raising children without lying.
I answered his question without lying.
Two years ago, when he was six, my son Romeo and I went to a 20/20 Video store which specializes in new, used, and adult DVDs. Their selection is broad and the set-up is family friendly. All the commercial releases are set up in racks in the front of the store. The back third of the store is walled off w/ a curtain for the adult titles.
We were scanning titles one day and I looked around at one point to notice my son had disappeared. I called his name and began looking for him. A moment or two later he popped out of the adult section, red-faced and embarrassed. This is a huge moment for impacting the child positively or negatively.
"Romeo, come here," I said to him.
He wouldn't come.
I knelt down to be on his eye level and it was clear he knew this moment was important to me.
"Come here," I said, opening my arms to him.
He wouldn't move.
I moved toward him on my knees and he backed slowly away.
"You're not in trouble," I told him.
"I don't want to come to you," he told me clearly.
"It's your choice," I replied. "You are big enough to decide what to do with your body."
He softened.
"And... this important for us to talk about. I'll be ready in the next day or two, and I encourage you to let me know when you are ready too."
He softened some more. "Okay, Dad."
Two days went by.
We were sitting on the couch and between commercials I paused the DVR and said, "I'm waiting for you to let me know when you are ready to talk about what happened at the store the other day."
He flushed, but seemed open.
"Tell me if now is the time," I stated.
He nodded.
"So, tell me what that was like for you."
He froze.
"Tell me if you liked what you saw and are interested in learning more, or if it was not interesting to you."
Quietly, he said, "I'd like to know more about that."
"Tell me what you know about it so far," I encouraged.
"It has something to do with making babies and being married," he mentioned.
Not bad. At that age to connect sex and porn to marriage and babies with little prior context. I was proud of him.
"Well," I said, "we can always talk more about this. There is nothing wrong with bringing this kind of thing to me. My job as your dad is to help you prepare for success in your life. Sex and women and those kinds of movies are a small part of your whole life, and, they are important. So remember to bring all of those kinds of questions to me."
He nodded and smiled.
"Thanks for making that easy, Dad," he said.
"Sure. And just so you know, the way our society is set up, that room in the DVD store is for people who are 18 years old and up."
He looked at me carefully. "So I should probably only go there with you?"
Smiling I replied, "We'll probably wait a little bit until we do that, but we can. One day. And just so you know, wanting to know more about sex and women and marriage and those kinds of movies is perfectly healthy."
So, I wasn't surprised two years later when he called with the question about masturbation.
Just a few weeks earlier we'd been talking about puberty and what to expect. A wonderful friend of mine had been talking about all the hormones and mood swings his 10-year old daughter was going through. It reminded me how much my son prefers to be prepared for changes of any size.
When we spoke about puberty I invited him to tell me what he already knew about it.
"Your voice drops and you start getting really strong and really hairy," he told me.
"And tell me what else you know about it," I encouraged.
"Well, its time to start dating and getting together with girls. They get breasts and want you to spend money on them," he finished.
Hmmm...
"Where did you learn this?" I asked.
"Just around."
"Okay," I replied. "How about I tell you what I think is missing from that."
He nodded.
"Your body is going to be going through a lot of chemical changes inside. The point of them is to help you grow responsible for yourself when you live on your own. They'll steer you into relationships with people so you can learn more about sharing yourself as an adult. Sex becomes very interesting and women become very mysterious. I'm here to help you learn what I know about it and when you need help outside of me you have your Uncle to talk to."
"Okay, Dad."
And that was pretty much it. Until he called me and asked "What is masturbation?"
It was just like you outlined Paul. He was with his best friend's Grandmother and both boys had asked her the question to begin with.
She immediately told them they'd have to ask their Dad's.
My son, I'm proud to say, asked if he could call me that minute.
I was renting videos at that time and didn't recognize the number on my phone, but I took the call just sensing that there was some importance to it.
"Dad, I have a question," came his little voice through the headset.
"Sure son, what is it?"
By now you know what he asked.
And I was stoked to give him the info he needed.
"Romeo, remember when we were talking about Puberty the other day?"
"Yes."
"Okay, well this is related. Tell me what you know about Masturbation so far."
"Nothing. I just heard it on an episode of Family Guy."
Great.
"Okay, when people pass into puberty their bodies are going through all these chemical and hormonal changes. Some of the ways they use all that energy are physical. People join sports teams or acting classes or learn to express themselves in new ways. And, some of the energy can only be expressed sexually, which means when two people come together and share their bodies physically. Kinda like in the movies when people kiss, only they take it farther."
"Yeah," he said, to make sure I knew he was listening.
"Now," I told him, "not everyone has someone they can express themselves sexually with and they still need a physical release of that kind of energy. So, for men, they'll play with their penises until sperm comes out and it can make a big change in their quality of attention."
"Okay, Dad. And for women, they play with their vagina?"
"Exactly."
"How soon am I supposed to start?"
"There's no 'supposed to', son. And, I'm pretty sure you'll know when it is," I assured him.
He paused.
"Do you have any other questions?" I asked.
"I don't think so."
"How was that for you? To hear my answer?" I asked.
"Fine," he replied sincerely.
"Did you notice yourself getting uncomfortable?"
"No." He sounded as though it were no big deal. As if he expected me to have accurate and complete information. He also sounded as though he were totally at ease having this conversation over the phone in front of his best friend and best-friend's Grandmother.
Realizing I'd been on speaker this whole time I asked the Grandmother if I'd missed anything.
"No, I think you got it," she replied. Hearing her embarrassment over the phone I could tell she was eager to wrap this up.
"Romeo? Do you have any more questions about this?"
"Nope," he replied, satisfied. "Talk to you later."
We've since spoken once or twice about the topic and it is still with the comfort and ease of that call. Over the years he's realized I'm a safe place to bring this type of thing.
Now I'm no parenting expert. I'm a student. And I'm passionate about raising children to take responsibility for themselves from the beginning.
Teaching children responsibility is a skill. It is a practice. And having the kind of result I'm pointing to above is a choice.
I'm really grateful Paul brought this up because it is really critical stuff. I'm in the process of launching a site for parents who are seeking tools and techniques which can allow them to move their families from struggle to cooperation.
It's all based on the work of Dr. Jayne A. Major, Ph.D. If you are interested in getting some of her best work check out a simple introduction page at http://breakthroughparentinginaction.com/announcements/first-time-here-check-this-post-out/ and take a peak.
Most of her work is available there with no commitments. For the sake of transparency, she and I are business partners and we are launching a series of offerings in the coming months that speak to this topic of how to raise children very specifically.
Thank you Paul for tackling this one. It is pivotal to our children's futures.
Yes, too much though in my opinion. I really only watch 2 types of shows: sports and cartoons/anime.
I should be able to cut down on sports. It's easier if you're engaged in coding to forget to turn a game on.
The cartoons I watch all are shown on Cartoon Network. Since I've seen most of the Family Guy episodes, that's easy to skip. The anime is harder. I find the stories much better than other programs on television.
I recently found a place in NYC that sells some popular anime on DVD imported from Japan. That allows me to get huge chunks of the series in one shot, as opposed to 1 or 2 episodes/week on TV. For example, I bought the entire Death Note series 2 weeks ago. It came in 3 containers with 3 DVDs each.
Since I don't live in NYC, I don't have to worry about frequenting there too often.
I watched the first 4 seasons of The West Wing on DVD. I've enjoyed some episodes of The Family Guy and The Simpsons.
When I was in high school I watched Star Trek:TNG.
I haven't had cable in 5 years though, so watching TV is pretty rare.
"Internet users don't want to watch TV shows online" != the truth.
Back in the dawn of Youtube I used to watch all The Daily Show I could fit into my over-sized head. I still love watching old episodes of Hockey Night in Canada and I have bookmarked a non youtube site that let's me watch South Park. I can't count HOW many times in University people would download, myself possibly included, episodes of Lost, Family Guy, America's Next Top model.
I'd say TV shows online are BETTER than on regular TV because you can watch them when you want. Hence the amazing popularity of TIVO I would assume since I don't have that service.