October 8, 2005 The Baby Returns, Continuing to Reign By NED MARTEL
In the new feature-length DVD of "Family Guy," Stewie, the show's famously precocious baby and leading man, gets to peek at his adult years. It wouldn't be sporting to reveal all he sees. Suffice it to say, he wonders: "Where are the monuments to me? Where are my legions of followers?"
This cartoon character seems poised to attract millions of what he would call minions in the home-entertainment market, where the series creator Seth McFarlane's satire has reshaped how a television show can survive cancellation and thrive in DVD sales. Fox canceled "Family Guy" in 2002 after three seasons of ratings it regarded as low. Popular reruns on Cartoon Network and strong sales of DVD's of the series persuaded Fox to begin broadcasting new episodes of the show, which currently appears on Sunday nights.
The new DVD, "Family Guy Presents Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story," went on sale two weeks ago, bypassing, for now, the airwaves of the Fox network.
Executives at 20th Century Fox Television, the studio that produces "Family Guy," say their interest in an original DVD preceded the show's return to the Fox prime-time schedule.
"The studio decided to put 'Family Guy' back in production before we heard the final word of interest from the network," said Gary Newman, president of the studio. This new DVD will be split into three episodes for broadcast on Fox in 2006, after a six-month period in which the material can be seen only on DVD.
Mr. Newman noted that the crowded syndication market had become less lucrative for studios. The question for his studio, he said, was "How do we mine the value of the product early in its lifespan?"
In the looser, longer DVD format, Stewie really comes into his own, embarking on a quest to find his real father, as he has long harbored a contemptuous belief that he must have been adopted. His regal, outsized personality busts out of the confines of his family's Rhode Island home. And the show's running joke has been watching this infant seethe like a captured dictator, readying for revenge on his slow-witted minders.
In the new DVD, there are many trademark diversions in which fantasies interrupt the story line, and in one of the funniest, Stewie is presented like Saddam Hussein in captivity. As always, the animators play off of familiar televised images, and a whiskery Stewie is shown in a spider hole and later under intrusive examination.
The 88-minute Stewie story does a lot with the extra time, adding bigger dimensions to the little guy. He still is easily frustrated, and then the epithets erupt out of the toddler, as he speaks in a clipped, fussy dialect � la Rex Harrison. He's a brainy geek, as opposed to his era's other cult-humor rival, the mouth-breathing "Napoleon Dynamite" lead character.
Only because Stewie is so tiny can we laugh at his trademark matricidal schemes, but his adult impulses are as disturbing as they are hilarious. This little dictator is at times fierce and cunning, and at others cute and helpless, and when one more indignity piles upon his weary psyche, he again turns on his mom: "At least have the decency to carry me, you lazy skank!" Then he falls asleep in one of those baby knapsacks.
Mr. McFarlane both writes and performs Stewie's lines, and the mewling often turns martial. The baby hurls grenades and sets traps that keep missing the target. "Damn you, vile woman" has become his signature cry, and a T-shirt slogan for the series. The running joke plays on the idea of babies as mini-despots, awaiting handmaidens to conduct feeding, changing, bathing. They get silent spaces for multiple naps and, for their waking hours, they receive instant antidotes for any spells of boredom. But as Stewie learns to stand on his own two feet, the parental attention subsides, and the infantile rage begins.
Of course, the 2's are never so terrible as the way Stewie inflicts them, and part of the larger commentary is about how quickly children grow up, learning methods from the outer world that will help assuage their inner hurt. The show is as much a vehicle for pop-culture commentary as it is a domestic comedy, and the writers are constantly referring to the schlocky shows they must have watched at a young age, as if they were spitting up mashed peas that they had been force-fed.
In many trippy fantasy scenes, the new DVD makes references to the thin gruel of TV seasons past, as if to exorcise the memories of Grant Goodeve, Ellen Cleghorne and that Ella Fitzgerald Memorex commercial with the shattering stemware. There's a wicked and bloody restaging of an old Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny showdown, which sends up the illusions of cartoon violence; with startling accuracy, we see the brutality of point-blank gunshots and hunters snapping the necks of their prey. Numerous snide asides make sure that current celebrities aren't spared, as when Britney Spears is depicted doing her sex-kitten routine in her wheelchair years, with a potbelly midriff bared to reveal a navel ring.
The most relentlessly and deliberately offensive slams come at the expense of local newscasts, where the contrivances of racial diversity and chirpy patter are mocked. The jovial Al-Rokeresque forecaster is known for "black-u-weather." In the new DVD, Peter Griffin, Stewie's lumpen dad, gets an Everyman soapbox on the broadcast, called "What Really Grinds My Gears." He uses it to mouth off about such aging-male frustrations as the confusion he feels about Lindsay Lohan's revealing, teasing outfits. "What do you want, Lindsay?" he asks. "Are we gonna go out?" Then he gives voice to what he thinks every man is afraid to admit: "We all know that no woman anywhere wants to have sex with anyone."
Stewie's sexuality is not yet coming into focus, even as he is beginning other adult experimentations, like drinking and driving. The emotional toasts and boasts he makes while drunk are some of the funniest moments in his new showcase. When he's had too many, again the echoes of television's dark side are heard: the baby morosely slurs the words to the "M*A*S*H" theme song, "Suicide Is Painless."
Stewie is an interesting epilogue to the trailblazing cartoon brat Bart Simpson, whose suspended age just before adolescence keeps him similarly ruled by older tyrants. Just as Bart giggles at Itchy and Scratchy's hideous sadism, Stewie gives in to fantasies fueled by "violence in movies and sex on TV," as "The Family Guy" theme song condemns. He is constantly slashing at irritants in the adult world, from his lascivious neighbor, Quagmire, whom he calls "Captain Syphilis," to the random guy in the elevator whom Stewie slaughters for not ending an annoying cellphone conversation.
He's just a baby, and the show's just a cartoon, but the truths, said in jest, are trenchant pop-culture messages, reconstituted with more bite than American audiences have ever tasted.
"Family Guy Presents Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story," $29.98, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment.