Word: guys
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
KEVIN WILLIAMSON Attractive teens! Hilfiger tie-ins! Still, The Faculty bombed. Now the Scream guy's got to learn to write...
...chairman David Hill insist they didn't set out to become the Animation Network, that the confluence of three new cartoon programs is sheer serendipity. Groening has been developing the millennium-timed Futurama for years, and The PJs was signed up months before MacFarlane arrived with Family Guy. But it's also true that The Simpsons, King of the Hill and Darnell's shockumentaries score best with young male viewers, who are much coveted by advertisers but increasingly hard to tear away from their Sony PlayStations. Fox is betting that an even more aggressive cartoon slate will increase its appeal...
...even the hottest new show on Fox's January animation schedule. The honor of debuting in the post-Super Bowl slot goes to Family Guy, the creation of Seth MacFarlane, a hitherto unknown artist who was just a year out of the Rhode Island School of Design when Fox shrewdly plucked him from the Hanna-Barbera animation stables. "Stunningly clever" is the way Darnell describes MacFarlane's initial pitch, at which the wunderkind performed all the voices himself. "Two weeks later we ordered 13 episodes, and Seth became a star," says Darnell. A seven-minute presentation reel the network took...
Network executives are supposed to say things like that, but an early 50-page script for the Family Guy pilot makes it clear that MacFarlane, at just 25, is a prodigiously talented writer. Family Guy, which is set in a sleepy Rhode Island city, falls squarely within the medium's venerable archetype of familial dysfunction, which is to say that Mom, Lois, is a saint; Dad, Peter, is a boob; the kids are mutants (baby Stewie, for instance, is an evil genius plotting world domination); and the voice of reason is Brian, the family's talking dog. The early plots...
...will be many, many more potential avenues of research than the entire pharmaceutical industry could possibly hope to investigate over the next 20 years. Each company has a different strategy for exploiting that bonanza, and most are more than happy to tell you what's wrong with the other guy's approach. But they all agree on a few key points...