| Wednesday, September 22, 2004 |
14:34 - I want to believe
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Okay, I'm gonna need to entreat someone's help here. I'm probably just not looking hard enough—after all, The Internet Knows Everything™. But I can't seem to find a detailed enough episode guide for Family Guy as to answer this question.
Last night, I was pounding away on stuff, with my back to the TV as Family Guy played; I wasn't really paying attention, as is my wont during that particular half-hour. It was the episode in which Brian (the dog) falls in love with Lois, and has to go to a shrink to work out his related mental problems. I happened to turn around, fortuitously enough, for the exchange in which Peter guffaws about Brian being "crazy"; he then becomes serious and supportive, and mentions that "lots of insane people have gone on to lead normal, successful lives."
The show then immediately cut to a three-second, silent, still photo: an old black-and-white shot of Dan Rather.
Just one of Family Guy's typical trademark non-sequitur cutaways, probably... but something about the way the scene was edited, something about the silence of the shot (no sound effects, no music), something made me wonder if somehow, just possibly, the Adult Swim guys had spliced in the picture of Dan Rather over whatever had previously been used in that cutaway. Just to be smirkingly topical, at the expense of the integrity of a show in syndication. (They've done it before—they had to alter "Even though they killed my Lord" to "I don't think they killed my Lord" in Peter's song about the Jews in order to show the "When You Wish Upon a Weinstein" episode on Adult Swim.)
So: could someone tell me if that clip always had Dan Rather there? Or was it someone else? Because it seems awfully serendipitous for that joke to have hit the air last night of all possible times.
UPDATE: Word from the underground is that Dan Rather was always in the scene there... and so this episode's appearance on Tuesday night was just an example of extremely kooky happenstance.
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Brian Tiemann
