Is Seth MacFarlane’s New Online Show A Rip-Off?
Family Guy’s Seth MacFarlane has been Fox’s golden boy ever since execs realized that drunk college kids love lowest-common-denominator humor. Now, he’s taking on the internet in a huge deal to develop “Seth MacFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy,” a web series that will deliver his core audience (read: mouth-breathing young men) to online advertisers via Google. Which is all well and good, except there’s something familiar about the show’s title and concept.
See, back in 2003, cartoonists Kelly Shane and Woody Compton released a New Yorker-style comic strip titled…wait for it…“Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy.” Coincidence? Perhaps. But in an interview, MacFarlane describes “Cavalcade” as “animated versions of the one-frame cartoons you might see in The New Yorker, only edgier.” You’d think a guy who created two identical television shows just by changing a dog into an alien would be a little more sensitive to the idea of originality. Read the 2003 comic strips below and judge for yourself.
[Is This Tomorrow & New York Times]
PodComics Studio July 1, 2008 at 6:23 pm
We think this is fantastic for short form animated Web series. We believe we have the world’s first daily animated series on the internet called “Traveling Gringos”. Our shorts are around 30 seconds each and come out Monday-Friday. We have been releasing daily episodes since February of 2008.
http://www.podcomics.com
Alex September 10, 2008 at 1:21 am
You’d think that not even changing the name suggests that he is either working with the original illustrators or at the very least intentionally naming the show the same as the strip to pay homage to it.