Patrick Warburton (The Emperor’s New Groove), the actor who has voiced police officer Joe Swanson on the hit Fox animated comedy series Family Guy for 25 years, has shared an interesting anecdote about his parent’s opinion of the show. According to Variety, Warburton appeared at PaleyFestLA to celebrate Family Guy’s 25 years on air and stated in an interview with People that his parents hated the comedy series so much that his mom once tried to cancel it!
Variety notes that Warburton said, “They hate the show even more today than they did 25 years ago. My father was in a monastery for three months. He almost became a monk. … My mother [went] around the neighborhood when I was 13 years old passing out pamphlets on the sins of masturbation, [which] did not get me into the cool crowd. So they hate the show.”
Warburton then said, “My mother belonged to the American Television Council and they were trying to get the show canceled. I was helping support my parents with Family Guy money. She tried to get me to sign the petition [to cancel the show]. I said, ‘Mom, if you don’t think I’m going to talk about this publicly, this is the greatest irony. You’re laundering money, you’re laundering it to yourself.’ They hate it more today.”
Family Guy also stars the voices of Seth MacFarlane (Ted), Seth Green (Robot Chicken), Alex Borstein (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel) and Mila Kunis (Black Swan), who joined the show during its second season.
Warburton also told People at the event, “Family Guy is a show that’s been running for 25 years. It’s a cartoon. It’s satire. As long as it remains relevant and current and creative, it [will] continue to go and to move.”
Variety also notes that MacFarlane feels similarly to Warburton about the future of Family Guy. He recently sat down for an interview with the Los Angeles Times to say he doesn’t “see a good reason to stop” just yet.
MacFarlane continued, “People still love it. It makes people happy and it funds some good causes. It’s a lot of extraneous cash that you can donate to Rainforest Trust and you can still go out to dinner that night. There was a time when I thought, ‘It’s time to wrap it up.’ At this point, we’ve reached escape velocity. I don’t know that there’s any reason to stop at this point unless people get sick of it. Unless the numbers show that people just are, ‘Eh, we don’t care about Family Guy anymore.’ But that hasn’t happened yet.”
New Family Guy episodes premiere on Fox every Wednesday at 9:30 p.m. PT/8:30 p.m. ET and are available on Hulu the following day.