Happy 5th Anniversary Family Guy

To celebrate Family Guy's fifth anniversary, Planet Family Guy takes a look back over the last five years of the show and the site.

Five years ago, on the 31st of January 1999, Seth MacFarlane's Family Guy made its dï¿½ut showing on the Fox Network immediately following the SuperBowl. We were introduced to the world of the Griffins, a new cartoon family ready to breath new life into the genre of adult animation. Ratings for the first episode, "Death Has A Shadow", were good, and the critics gave rave reviews. The Daily Variety said, "Family Guy is undeniably clever! Uproarious premiere! Wildly eccentric. Unimaginably creative!", The Hollywood Reporter, "Family Guy is bright, entertaining! Witty and warm. The voices are praiseworthy!", and Entertainment Weekly "Family Guy is what you'd get if you put Hank Hill, Homer Simpson, and Cartman in a blender!"

A further six episodes were shown to complete the first season of the show, which was shortly followed by the start of the second season in September of that same year. This second season did not run so smoothly, and Seth MacFarlane's creation was set to face hurdle after hurdle in the following years. MacFarlane's former headmaster protested against the show, and managed to get many advertisers to shun it. After the showing of the first two episodes of the second season, Family Guy was taken off of Fox's schedule, only to return a few months later with irregular time slots. One of the season's episodes, "When You Wish Upon A Weinstein", was actually banned by the network after being deemed too controversial.

The "Save Family Guy" website was created soon after the first airing of "Death Is A Bitch" in attempt to ensure the show's future. The site set up several campaigns to get Fox to wake-up to the popularity of Family Guy, however by the summer of 2000 Fox cancelled it. "Save Family Guy" continued its campaign, and eventually Fox made a U-turn and renewed the show for a third season. All this time Stewie was e-mailing his fans (minions) from his e-mail address loismustdie@yahoo.com (as he revealed in the episode "Death Is A Bitch") drumming up support for the show. As the days went by, the number of Stewie's minions grew.

Read our article on the first Save Family Guy campaign, "Stewie's Minions: the first Save Family Guy campaign" here.

During this campaign period the "There's Something About Family Guy" website was launched, joining the other fan sites that were around at the time, including "All In the Family Guy", "Mr Weed.com", and "Family Guy Online". TSAFG soon began pimping the "Save Family Guy" campaign, and quickly a friendship between the two sites emerged. In the late summer of 2000 "Save Family Guy" became "Stewie's Minions" and by September, after Fox had renewed Family Guy, "Stewie's Minions" and "There's Something About Family Guy" merged. The "There's Something About Family Guy" brand remained for a while, but by October the site was renamed "Planet Family Guy".

Family Guy's online presence continued to evolve, while several of the original fansites closed a new breed of websites opened, including "Spooner Street", "Stewie's Silo", and the "Family Guy Forums". All this time, the word of Family Guy was spreading across the globe with international sites opening in various languages including French and German.

The third season of Family Guy began to air on Fox in July 2001. A few days before the season started "Planet Family Guy" did an interview with Seth MacFarlane and things sounded good for the show. The "Family Guy Forums" had closed and been replaced with the much larger "DamnYouAll.net" (which had been created for Stewie after the amount of email sent to his Yahoo! crippled it). The community grew, but the viewing ratings were falling. Fox was once again messing around with the scheduling of the show, and the competition on other networks was too strong. As the third season drew to a close, so did the shows future as Fox announced that they were officially cancelling the show again in 2002. This time it seemed for good. The various fan sites of the time, including this one, joined forces and campaigned long and hard for the show to be renewed. An online petition addressed to Ms. Gail Berman and Mr. Sandy Grushow, the President of Entertainment and Chairman of Fox at the time, was signed by over 100,000 people, and Fox was at the receiving end of a large mailing campaign. Some fans even got together to form a demonstration outside the studios, but Fox just didn't listen.

Listen to Planet Family Guy's Seth MacFarlane interview here.

This did not kill off the shows loyal fan base however. More fan sites opened including "Family Guy Files", "Brian's Bar", "FGMMA", and "EvilMonkey.tv". "DamnYouAll.net" continued to grow, and then news of Family Guy's return to the screens was rumoured. Whilst a new season wasn't ordered, Cartoon Network's Adult Swim began to re-run the series and reported record-breaking ratings. Fox then announced that it would release every episode of Family Guy onto DVDs which ended up setting records as well. The Family Guy DVDs became the best selling TV DVDs in America. Family Guy was becoming big, and had been out of production for more than a year!

Fox finally began to realize that they had killed Family Guy off in its infancy. Talks began between the network and Seth MacFarlane about a possible return of Family Guy through a direct-to-DVD movie, which by the start of this year had become the announcement of 35 new episodes going into production. Once more Family Guy has broken a record, it is the first show to be renewed by the network after being cancelled some time before due to high DVD sales and huge re-run ratings on another station.

In five years, 50 episodes of Family Guy have been produced and aired making hundreds of references to pop culture from Star Wars to Seseame Street, Batman to Clinton. It has also attracted a wide selection of guest voices including Adam West, Mark Hamill, Kiss, Luke Perry, and Jenna Jameson. Family Guy has also managed to win a couple of Emmy awards, for Outstanding Music and Lyrics for the song "You've Got a Lot To See" from the episode "Brian Wallows and Peter's Swallows" in 2002, and in 2000 Seth MacFarlane won the award for Outstanding Voice-Over Performance for his Stewie voice. Also in 2000 it was nominated for Outstanding Animated Program ("Road to Rhode Island") and Outstanding Music and Lyrics ("We Only Live To Kiss Your Ass") Emmy awards.

As we celebrate five years of our beloved show, the team behind Family Guy is reuniting and ready to produce a whole new season. The show has become widely spoken of, and for once the future looks bright for the Griffins.

Happy birthday Family Guy from all of us at Planet Family Guy and the many fans from all around the globe.

The story is to be continued.....