After 27 Years, Family Guy’s Unaired Pilot Episode Is No Longer Lost – SlashFilm

When Seth MacFarlane’s “Family Man” premiered on January 31, 1999 after Tremendous Bowl XXXIII (the one the place John Elway’s Denver Broncos walloped the, yikes, Chris Chandler-led Atlanta Falcons), it acquired a synthetic rankings bump proper out of the gate that was going to be troublesome for the animated sequence to keep up. Certainly, after ending its first season at thirty third within the Nielsen rankings (with solely seven episodes), the present’s viewership evaporated throughout its second season and fell off much more throughout its third season. Virtually nobody was watching, so Fox pulled the plug on the sequence in 2002. Three years later, due to a surge in recognition pushed by Grownup Swim syndication, Fox gave “Family Man” one other shot, and it seems that it’s by no means, ever going away. This may occasionally or could not delight you.

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In any occasion, we have now gone 26 years with “Family Man” in our lives, and whereas the state of the world has been in drastic decline over this era, you possibly can’t lay the blame for all of our miseries on the ft of MacFarlane’s unabashedly crass and violent animated sequence. Positive, it is turn into a repository for witlessly tasteless and, worse, repetitive gags (versus the far superior “The Simpsons,” which is simply gamely treading water), nevertheless it nonetheless, for essentially the most half, goals on the proper cultural and political targets.

After 23 seasons of “Family Man,” it is fascinating to look all the way in which again to the beginning of the present to see how a lot it is modified. For die-onerous followers of the sequence, it is by no means been sufficient to rewatch the pilot. Their holy grail has at all times been the 16-minute, roughly animated pitch that MacFarlane used to earn a greenlight from Fox. Seven minutes of this demo episode have been included on the present’s “Quantity 2” DVD units, however the entire shebang went unseen till just lately. Now you can watch the entire mini-pilot on YouTube. How does it differ from the aired 1999 pilot, and why was it underneath wraps for thus lengthy?

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Final week, the Lost Media Wiki found MacFarlane’s 16-minute pilot on the web site of animator Robert Paulson (insert “Battle Membership” jokes right here). In the event you’re questioning the way it might go unfound for thus lengthy, that is as a result of Paulson did not add it till 2022. As for the way it differs from the official pilot, “Loss of life Has a Shadow,” the narrative is similar. It is simply shorter and never fairly as humorous.

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The episode nonetheless revolves round a hungover Peter getting fired from his high quality-management gig on the toy manufacturing facility for falling asleep on the job, which ends up in a spate of wildly harmful toys getting shipped to shops. As in “Loss of life Has a Shadow,” he’s briefly the illicit beneficiary of a welfare test processing error, which entitles him to a weekly fee of $150,000. The present’s early components is there: the youngsters aren’t as sharply drawn, however you’ve got acquired Stewie repeatedly making an attempt to kill Lois. The most important absence is definitely the Kool-Help Man crashing by the wall of the courthouse the place Peter is being sentenced to 2 years in jail for gleefully misappropriating welfare funds. Mainly, the punch-ups are lacking.

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This 16-minute episode solely price $50,000, and, nicely, it appears to be like it. However when you’re a giant-time “Family Man” fan, it is a should-watch. It is also a reminder that the present was once fairly rattling humorous earlier than it went overboard on a by no means-ending string of gory gags (and jokes stolen from “The Simpsons” and “South Park”).