The Family Guy Blog: See what YOU can find.

[Peter Paltridge]

http://blog.familyguy.com/

This is the official Family Guy blog, written by one of the staff (and in the comments sections, many other members of the staff show up). I found this buried in the comments, and it sounds like a Toon Zone post yet it comes from a director on the series.



Posted by: zac Moncrief (director on Fg) at May 15, 2006 09:48 AM
Enjoyed the episode, far more than recent efforts. My only complaints are the usual ones such as the treatment of Meg and jokes running on for too long. The Meg treatment is particularly annoying because it had no real basis in the previous seasons. I think back to "Let's Go to the Hop" and how Peter ultimately proved how much he really cared for her. There's none of that this season. Seeing Meg spit on, hit with a baseball bat, and ignored as she's put in jail is really unfunny. I'm hoping that will be fixed soon (and I realize that as a director, it's not necessarily you who these criticisms are for).

The long jokes are getting too much, as well, if only because they're in every episode. They used to be a staple of the show, something that happened every ten episodes and so it seemed special. The chicken fight, Peter skinning his knee, etc. Those were brilliant. But in the last year, the novelty has worn off. This Godfather discussion could have been side-splittingly funny if similar conversations (full of "um"s "yeah"s and "uh"s) didn't happen every week, or if you guys just stopped at "I didn't like the Godfather" since that was a punchline in itself.

This is from the comments page for the Untitled Griffin Family History episode (which is called "GET YO POPCORN READY"). Somewhere on that same page is a post from Dan Povenmire where he reveals his favorite line so far from any episode.

See what YOU can find buried in this blog, and post it here! It'll give you something to do during the long summer wait besides making more "Cartoon characters that do this and this" lists.

[SirLemming]

Wow. How odd.

(Though I did like the Godfather gag.)

[Peter Paltridge]

I think we finished the last of the DVD commentaries last week including one for "PTV" which is my personal favorite. "PTV" contains a whole gag that standards would not let us put on the air which may be the funniest thing in the whole damn show so watch out for it in the next group hitting stores in fall.

We just had a table read for "Blue Harvest" a new show written by Alec Sulkin (his first show NOT collaborating with the harlequin-romance-hero-named Wellsley Wild) and it is freakin' brilliant! I think that I am not overstating this to say that this particular episode will be historically and culturally significant in the coming century. I can't really go into why without giving too much away, but I'm not actually joking when I say that.

Actually, let's see if I can without tipping it. . . You know how "A Christmas Carol" is such a part of the American psyhe that all sorts of shows have just put their characters into that story as a special holiday episode? It's almost obligitory that if you're on the air long enough, you have to do your Scrooge Show. I can't actually think of another story that is used beat for beat like this.

Well, this episode may define the story that will be like that for coming generations.
I think this guy might be boasting just a LIIIIIITTLE bit.

[Peter Paltridge]

From the Petergeist talkback:


Your right Amy, Don Knotts came in and did the voice..I believe it is one of his last performance if not the last...
Huh! Really! I didn't see his name in the credits....

[judyindisguise]

I think this guy might be boasting just a LIIIIIITTLE bit.

Ah, irony. Family Guy rips off everybody in lieu of creating anything original. Now it's gonna "give back" to the creative community by coming up with something everybody else can rip off. Hey, it's the least it can do. ;)

[Lonestarr]

Actually, that first post came from a (wise) man called Drew. The post's author is listed at the bottom.

[OverMaster]

I think this guy might be boasting just a LIIIIIITTLE bit.

Ten bucks say almost no one out of hardcore toon fans like us will remember that ep at all two years after its airing. :sweat:

[Jazman]

Man you guys just now discovered that blog? I"ve been going there for almost a year, cause the writers love to spill some info about future episodes and production numbers and such. A great place to go, and one that many here should try. The writers respond to critics suggestions very well, sometimes admitting when they didn't like a particular gag, or letting us know if a different gag was cut in another's place. That's how I found out about the deleted song in "Petarded" just a few hours after that episode premired.

[The Myst]

For Cherry Chevapravatdumrong, who wrote "Sibling Rivalry," it was her first script and her first commentary.

Good job to her. One of my favorites of the new season.

[Peter Paltridge]

Aww.....Dan is leaving Family Guy. There is good news, though....



Hello to all,
As some of you might remember me mentioning, that over the last year, in addtition to my Family Guy duties, I have been working on a pilot at Disney Channel for an animated show of my own. The show is called “Phineas and Ferb” and I created it with my old writing partner from “Rocko’s Modern Life,” Jeff “Swampy” Marsh. It is a fun cartoony show, with the same wacky comic sensibilities of SpongeBob or Rocko, but with slightly more plot.
A few years earlier I had pitched Phineas and Ferb to Nickelodeon and Fox Kids and had gotten pretty high up the chain of command at both of those studios before someone said “no.” About 2 years ago, I pitched it to Disney and received an immediate “This is not what we’re looking for.” They did ask if they could keep the pitch packet and I said “Sure,” but asking to keep the packet is often just a nice way of saying “we’re going to throw this away as soon as you close the door.” Imagine my surprise almost a year later when I get a call out of the blue from Disney saying they want to option Phineas and Ferb. But, having been through development before, I wasn’t getting my hopes up.
I was one of ten shows that they were developing to script, out of those they would do 3 pilots and test them with focus groups and the one pilot that tested best would be their new show. So basically, I had a one in ten shot. I convinced Meghan Cole, the executive in charge of my show, that I should go straight to storyboard from outline rather than write a script, then I would “pitch” the board to the other execs. This is the way we did SpongeBob and Rocko, and it gives you opportunity to do a lot more visual humor. Swampy was living in England at the time but he had already scheduled a trip to the states, so we got together for a few days to flesh out the outline.
While on vacation in France for two weeks in September of last year, I boarded the entire pilot and stopped by England on the way back for one more brainstorming session with Swampy. When I got back into town I pitched the board to Barry Blumberg, the head of Disney TV Animation at the time. He said he liked it, but had qualms over whether it was too wacky in design for the Disney Channel executives. He asked if I would consider changing the designs to be “more attractive,” and I gave him a flat out “No.”
I told him that people would either buy into the characters or not, and if it ever did get on the air, it would be more successful if it did NOT look like everything else on the channel. He seemed satisfied with this, but he still had misgivings.
The next week, Gary Marsh and Adam Bonnett, the top executives at Disney Channel had heard that the pitch went well and wanted to see it, so I came back in and pitched it to them. They laughed out loud, I mean big belly laughs, slapping their thighs, the whole nine yards (anyone out there who has ever pitched anything to network executives knows this is not the usual reaction). They said they loved it but were not sure how it would fit on their network because it was so different from their other shows. One of the other execs suggested that they could throw it into the mix as a “wild card” and see how it tests.
A few weeks later there was a big regime change at Disney TV Animation. I held my breath because a regime change in the middle of development usually means the kiss of death for your project, but when Barry Blumberg left, Gary Marsh became the head of TV Animation as well as the Channel. Gary is the one who had laughed out loud at my pitch so I survived another round.
As it turned out, they only went to pilot on two of the ten show ideas instead of three. Mine was one and the other one was a “Chicken Little” show. “Chicken Little?” I asked one of the development execs, “You mean, my little unknown show is going to test against a multi-million dollar Disney Franchise that had name recognition before it was even made?” This didn’t sound like a fair fight to me. What’s more, I knew they were making a “Chicken Little 2” movie, so obviously they would be hot to synergize and cross-promote and all that nonsense.
Now all modesty aside, I was reasonably sure I could make a funnier show that Chicken Little, but when I went out to the mall and saw the merchandise filling the shelves and hear little kids screaming “Chicken Little, mom, Chicken Little!” I must admit my heart sank. I decided to not worry about getting a pick up and just concentrate on making the best pilot I could.
I got a call from Meghan Cole, the executive in charge of my project, and she told me that after nearly a decade at Disney, she was leaving to work at MTV. Another thing that will kill your project quick is if your executive leaves the company during the process. I held my breath, but still “Phineas and Ferb” survived.
Then there was an even bigger regime change at Disney. Disney bought Pixar and put John Lassiter in charge of all of Disney Feature Animation. Although everyone assured me he would not be futzing with the TV Animation side, I held my breath to see if this would impact me and sure enough, it did. The first thing Lassiter did when he took power was to nix the “Chiken Little 2” movie, giving the “Chicke Little” TV series nothing to cross-promote. My chances just went up a notch and John Lassiter was now my personal hero as well as one of my animation gods.
We finished the pilot and it was scheduled to start testing the following Monday in Seattle. Disney invited me to go to the testing, but I had already planned to take some time off and spend a week on an Island in Venezuela with my wife and her family. They told me they would email me Monday evening as soon as they saw how the testing was going.
Now on the island we were staying, we had no Wi-Fi connection. In order to check my email, we had to drive down a series of twisty mountain roads with no street signs to an internet café of sorts (if you can call a long narrow un-air-conditioned room with half-broken plastic chairs and computers that seem to pre-date the bronze-age a “café”). I made that trek over and over again throughout the week. There was no word from Disney. This did not seem like a good sign to me. Surely if it was good news they would have sent word.
When I got back into town, there was no message of any kind from Disney on my machine. The next day, I was at Disney just picking up a few things from my office and I ran into the music supervisor who told me congratulations. “About what?” I asked him.
“Phineas and Ferb tested great!” he said as though I should already know this.
“It did? What have you heard?”
“Well I saw the live feed from the testing and the kids were laughing out loud. . .” he stopped suddenly and gave me a look, “Oh, maybe I wasn’t supposed to tell you.”
My next meeting with the execs they started talking about doing a “partial pick up,” meaning they wanted to pay us to do six outlines and two storyboards before they made the official green light decision on June 12th. This I took as a good sign. In anticipation of a pick up (and because he was sick of living in England) Swampy moved back to the states. For the next two months there was constant talk about this “partial pick up” as well as a “full early pick up” that was always just around the corner. I heard the phrase “I wouldn’t be surprised if you got a full pick up by the end of the week,” every week for 7 weeks. They did pay us to do a rewrite on the series bible (an overview of the series and descriptions of all the characters) to flesh it out, but this “early pick up” remained elusive. I was sure that if the greenlight came, it would not come until their June 12th deadline. No decision in Hollywood ever gets made until the last moment.
Things were still looking good, though. When it came time for the testing debrief meeting, Swampy and I were invited and the Chicken Little team was not. This was for good reason because we kicked all kinds of butt in the testing.
Disney gave us the go-ahead to write two outlines and that would take us right up to the June 12th deadline when they would make the final greenlight decision.
They loved the first outline and actually started hiring our first board team. Here, finally, was finally the “early partial pick up” we had heard so much about. Of course “early” is a relative term, this happened a full four days before the June 12th deadline. We finished the second outline and handed it in at 9 AM on Monday, June 12th. Then, we waited on the edge of our seats. This was the day they were to make the official greenlight decision. This was the day we had been waiting the better part of a year for. . . And . . . nothing happened, end of business and still no call. Well, they did have us scheduled the very next day for a meeting to discuss the bible changes and the outlines. Perhaps they were waiting to tell us in person.
The next day we go to the meeting and they tell us how much they liked the changes in the bible and the first outline but have some questions about the second outline. We answered all the questions to their satisfaction and they gave us the go-ahead on the second outline as well. . . but still no official geenlight. Having passed their own self-imposed deadline for a greenlight, I now had no guess as to when they might actually make that decision. I was starting to doubt that it would ever happen.
The next day they called me and just matter-of-factly said “Oh, we had a meeting with Gary and you’ve been greenlit. Sixteen episodes.” After almost a year of anticipation, it was almost anti-climactic. It wasn’t till I called my wife to tell her and heard the emotion in her reaction that it really started to sink in. This was the moment I’ve been working for since I got into this business! I’m gonna have my own show!
So mark your calendars, “Phineas and Ferb” goes on the air in September of 2007.
The only sad part is that this will be my last Family Guy episode. There’s a possibility that I will stay on as a consultant on musical numbers, which I would love, but I will no longer be directing my own episodes. I am really going to miss coming in here on a daily basis and helping to make one of the funniest shows ever on television. It has been an honor, a joy and a privilege to work with all of these amazing people and I will miss them.
I am truly excited, though, to be working on my own show and trying to make it one of the funniest shows on television. Of course, it is Disney Channel, so I will have to do it without all the masturbation jokes. The sacrifices we make.