Cartoon Cavalcade of Loosely-Related Jokes

If there's still anyone out there who thinks Family Guy doesn't have stories, they need to see Seth MacFarlane's Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy: Uncensored. Basically it's an hour of unrelated jokes with seemingly no organization. Though perhaps "jokes" is putting it too kindly: there are far more misses than hits in this collection, if by "hit" we mean something that's both funny and disgusting and not just disgusting.

If my DVD player had some kind of chapter shuffle mode and I was deaf to the sound of the disc spinning in the drive, I would have been perfect unable to tell whether shuffle was on or off. There is a little bit of organization, to be fair: some of the "Sex With _____" segments are clustered together. But still, the whole thing feels like a bunch of scenes that were proposed as digressions for an episode of Family Guy but were all rejected. I can easily imagine Stewie saying "Ugh, that would be more painful than sex with Optimus Prime!" and a cut to the "Sex With Optimus Prime" clip from the Cavalcade. Or Stewie saying "I'd rather be stuck on a lifeboat with Matthew McConaughey!" and a cut to the "Stuck on a Life Raft With Matthew McConaughey" clip from the Cavalcade.

However, these would supposedly have been censored out even if they had survived the initial pitch. The McConaughey clip, for example, would only have been cut from a Family Guy episode for time; the censors seem to be perfectly fine with cartoon deadly force but seriously uptight about cartoon sex. Or what about the already-infamous "Fred Flintstone Takes a [expletive]"? Other than the title card, this too could have been put on TV: we see little besides the dividers for the bathroom stalls for the duration of the clip, and while the sound effects are disgusting (some in and of themselves, and some due to the context), they have all appeared on TV before. Considering the semiotics of this clip on an intellectual level, it could actually be funny. But it goes on for way too long, the static shot makes the clip feel much longer than it actually is.

Though most of these clips go on for way too long, there's still something missing: A story! The clips that I've mentioned in this blog post, couldn't they be integrated into a Brian/Stewie "Road to" episode? And what happens in a Brian/Stewie "Road to" episode? Brian and Stewie go somewhere, and then they come home. They usually learn something from the journey. That's a story.