Is Seth MacFarlane’s New Online Show A Rip-Off?

prubin — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 17:43:49 +0000

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]

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Is Seth MacFarlane’s New Online Show A Rip-Off?