Easily masticated comedy -- plus a fervent audience of college kids in baggy cargo shorts bursting with disposable income and electronics -- also made MacFarlane a natural fit for Google. In September, the first of 50 bizarro animated shorts by MacFarlane appeared online. Seth MacFarlane's Cavalcade Of Cartoon Comedy, distributed by Google via its AdSense network, is a series of Webisodes that MacFarlane describes as edgier versions of New Yorker cartoons come to life.
Running from 30 seconds to just over two minutes, the shorts are sponsored by advertisers and noteworthy for a host of reasons. For fans, they are MacFarlane's first non-TV venture and so exist outside the reach of censors and network suits and introduce a universe of entirely new characters. For the entertainment industry, they mark the first experiments with a bold new method of content distribution (and the entry of the beast Google into its world). This purportedly unsophisticated hack comic now finds himself, in some ways by accident, at the intersection of advertising, television, and the Web -- all of which are blurring together.
Perhaps it's not surprising, then, that while a MacFarlane product like Family Guy may seem slapdash when you're watching it, the creative process behind it is decidedly sophisticated. "He's kind of a modern-day cross between George Lucas and Norman Lear," says his manager, John Jacobs. "He thinks on a big canvas."
Says Norman Lear himself, a man who was once also the highest-paid creator on TV: "I'm crazy about him and his work. I can't think of anybody doing a better job right now of mining the foolishness of the human condition."
Image: Actor James Kyson Lee at the Cavalcade Of Cartoon Comedy premiere | Photograph: Charley Gallay/ Getty Images
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