Monday, April 14, 2014

Seth MacFarlane and His Peculiar Distaste For Tucson

Posted By on Mon, Apr 14, 2014 at 11:30 AM


I'm the last person you'd call a Tucson apologist, but even I'm starting to get a little uncomfortable with all of the bashing our community has gotten from long-running animated sitcom Family Guy.

The latest jab at the Old Pueblo came in Sunday night's episode, when after Lois and the Griffin family were worried that Peter's business trips had made him too intelligent and aloof, they decided the only way to fix this was to send him to America's dumbest city as a way of reversing his smarts.

So, of course, that meant the next scene had Peter walking into a room with a sign that said "Welcome to Tucson," followed by the sight of several slack-jawed and summer-toothed simpletons punching each other in the junk while giggling.

The trip apparently worked, as Peter came home as his old dumb self, declaring that while in Tucson he'd seen a wet T-shirt contest using chocolate milk at the Tucson Philharmonic. Oh, and that Battleship was still in theaters here.

(Stupid writers: we don't have a philharmonic)

This is at least the fourth jab at Tucson in the past two years on either Family Guy or another Seth MacFarlane-made show, American Dad. Past digs include calling this city unnecessary, questioning the University of Arizona's admission standards and a variety of observations about the region while on a helicopter tour.

There have also been clips dedicated toward Arizona's immigration stance and fondness of illegal immigrants, but since that's completely true there's no reason to quibble.

From what I can gather, there's no overt reason for MacFarlane's raging hate boner for Tucson, but there's got to be something to it. Maybe he couldn't get a good enough deal on renting Old Tucson Studios to film his soon-to-be-released Western comedy, A Million Ways to Die in the West? He went with Santa Fe, instead, which probably means there will be a lot of new age cowboys used as extras.

I'm still a Family Guy fan, and each episode includes at least two or three good laughs, and I'm sure the Tucson digs would be funnier if they applied to another city. I'm just surprised at the overabundance of them, as well as the fact that none have been in reference to the modern streetcar.

There's enough material in that train wreck of a project for endless mock Tucson scenes.

Hey, at least this latest bash got someone to spark up a healthy debate on Yahoo! Answers, where someone started the "Family Guy says Tucson is the dumbest city, do you agree?" thread. Kudos to one person for citing "several internationally acclaimed spas" as a reason against our dumbness.


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