While I was watching the re-run of Family Guy last night-Sunday December 2nd, 2007- it occurred to me that parody’s abound-from the Archie Bunker style titles to the Back to the Future dance during the show. The opening song is amusing to me since it’s full of irony as Lois sings about the violence in movies and sex on TV. While this show has plenty of violence and allusions to sex during the entire program-Stewie is constantly plotting the death of his mother or how to take over the world, and Quagmire is always trying to score with someone during the show.
The episode broadcast last night has Peter wishing he could go back in time to 1984 and relive some of his youth so he can experience being a party animal! Peter and Brian are sent back in time by their friend “Death” and Peter has a great time dancing and hanging out with Cleveland in a bar/club that entire evening that they go back in time. But while Peter and Brian have a great time they return to the present day to find that Lois has married Quagmire and Peter is married to Molly Ringwald. Peter’s forced to beg “Death” to send him back so that he can fix what he did wrong and end up with Lois again. On their way to find “Death” we learn that there were a few changes in history that we might not have expected that include; Al Gore winning the 2000 election, universal health care that apparently works as hardly anyone is dying, a low crime rate because everyone has an education and is working and flying cars that run on vegetable oil! Now
there’s a future worth living for! It made me think of living through the movie It’s a Wonderful Life and finding out that the world really WOULD be better off without you.
After Peter went back to his youth for the second time it made me wonder who of us wouldn’t do things differently. I know that if I had the chance to go back for just one day when I was in college I’d want to do things different. I’d want to go out to a club or ask someone out that I didn’t have the courage to at the time, or see a concert or even go somewhere spur of the moment-like fly to the Grand Canyon! But Peter has a difficult time getting his act together to the point where “Death” is tired of giving him mulligans. Peter has to do it himself and then comes another parody-of the movie Back to the Future as Brian plays the role of Michael J Fox playing the guitar during the dance as Peter-playing the George McFly character-tries to win over Lois as he goes to kiss her. In the end it works out the way we’d expect it. Peter ends up winning Lois over again and we all look forward to the odd and outrageous story line of next week.
Family Guy Website
http://www.familyguy.com/
Back to the Future
http://www.bttfmovie.com/
Monday, December 03, 2007
