The Boondocks is an American animated series created by Aaron McGruder on Cartoon Network's late night programing block, Adult Swim, based on McGruder's comic strip of the same name. The Boondocks is a social satire of African American culture and race relations revolving around the lives of the Freeman family: ten-year-old Huey, his younger brother, eight-year-old Riley, and their grandfather, Robert. The series is produced by Rebel Base and has finished airing its third season on Adult Swim. In a 2011 interview, cast member, John Witherspoon announced that the series has been renewed for a fourth season, which will consist of 20 episodes.
The Boondocks takes place in the same place and time frame as its comic counterpart. The Freeman family, having recently moved from the South Side of Chicago, Illinois to the peaceful suburb of Woodcrest, find different ways to cope with this acute change in setting as well as the drastically different suburban cultures and lifestyles to which they are exposed. The perspective offered by this mixture of cultures, lifestyles, and races provides for much of the comedy in this series.
The series premiered on November 6, 2005. The 15-episode first season ended on March 19, 2006. The second season premiered on October 8, 2007. (Two of its 15 episodes, "The Hunger Strike" and "The Uncle Ruckus Reality Show," were not aired, but they appeared on the DVD release.) The third season began airing on May 2, 2010 and concluded on August 15, 2010. On May 9th, 2011 a Youtube video was uploaded that shows John Witherspoon being interviewed. He has confirmed that a Season 4 will air, and will have 20 episodes.
Origins
The Boondocks began its life as a comic strip in
The Diamondback, the student newspaper at McGruder's
alma mater, the
University of Maryland, College Park. The strip later found its way into
The Source magazine. Following these runs, McGruder began simultaneously pitching
The Boondocks both as a syndicated comic strip and as an animated television series. The former goal was met first, and
The Boondocks debuted in newspapers in April 1999.
In the meantime, development on a Boondocks TV series continued. McGruder and film producer/director Reginald Hudlin created a Boondocks pilot for the Fox Network, but found great difficulty in making the series acceptable for network television. Hudlin left the project after the Fox deal fell through, although McGruder and Sony Television are contractually bound to continue to credit him as an executive producer. Mike Lazzo president of Adult Swim and executive producer for Aqua Teen Hunger Force and Space Ghost Coast to Coast stumbled across the pilot and declared it too networky and ordered a 15 episode season and told McGruder to just tell stories.
The series has a loose connection with the continuity of the comic strip, though during the final year of the comic strip McGruder made a point to try to synchronize both. He introduced Uncle Ruckus into the strip, and the comic strip version of Riley's hair was braided into Cornrows to match the character's design in the series.
During the series' first season, McGruder put the strip on a six-month hiatus beginning in March 2006. He did not return to the strip the following November, and the strip's syndicate, Universal Press Syndicate, announced that it had been cancelled.
The opening theme song used in the series (slightly remixed for the second season and again for the third season) is performed by hip-hop artist Asheru.
Characters
Huey Freeman is one of the three main characters. He is each episode's primary narrator (usually), the voice-of-reason and moral compass of the family, and a spokesperson for contemporary Afrocentrism. He is an intelligent, wise-beyond-his-years ten-year-old who is an avid reader and knowledgeable about a variety of subjects. He is heavily influenced by the theories of various social movements and social justice leaders. He is constantly ridiculed and underestimated by his family, who thinks he is a fool for having goals and values that aim higher than those of the lower class environment from which they came. While Huey promotes various social causes, he is openly contemptuous of African-American pop culture as portrayed in mainstream American media for glamorizing wasteful extravagance, self-defeating lifestyles, and ignorance. Unlike the other characters, Huey rarely smiles; although, in the episode "Let's Nab Oprah", he smiles after his duel with Riley. He also smiles when Riley begins to succeed in winning basketball games in the episode "Ballin'".
Riley Freeman is Huey's trouble-making, eight-year-old younger brother. Unlike his brother, Riley is an enthusiastic follower of contemporary African-American pop culture. Though he is otherwise charming, clever, and artistically gifted, Riley maintains loyalty to those pop culture ideals, even in the face of their self-destructive consequences. The bulk of the series' episodes focus on Riley's misadventures (most of which are fueled by his love of gangsta rap, and a desire to emulate other people he admires), or on his various outlandish schemes, which his grandfather often endorses and assists in. Despite his wild nature and attempts to appear tougher than he actually is, Riley occasionally shows a softer, innocent side.
Robert Freeman, a.k.a. "Granddad," is the grandfather and legal guardian of Huey and Riley. While he loves his two grandsons, he sometimes explodes in tirades of angry frustration over the constant schemes, misadventures, and wise-cracking observations they have brought into his life. Robert himself is no stranger to this; for instance, his eager, misguided dating pursuits invariably attract bizarre or dangerous women. According to the Season 3 episode "It's a Black President, Huey Freeman", "Nobody knows exactly how old Robert Freeman is -- not even Robert Freeman himself. When The Empire Strikes Back was released in theaters, the woman he was seeing at the time nicknamed him "Lando," after the character Lando Calrissian. A big believer in the values of a long-gone generation of African-Americans, Robert often threatens to discipline on his grandsons through Three Stooges-style corporal punishment. He generally uses his belt for this purpose and has developed a remarkable degree of speed and dexterity in wielding it.
Michael Caesar Michael Caesar (known by his surname) is a fictional character from the comic strip The Boondocks, created by Aaron McGruder. Caesar was Huey's classmate and best friend during the comic strip's run. Formerly from Brooklyn, New York, he was moved to the fictional predominately white suburb of Woodcrest under circumstances similar to Huey's; in which typically results in him needing little prompting to vocally represent his hometown. He and Huey have co-founded the newsletter The Free Huey World Report and the annual Most Embarrassing Black People Awards. He will arrive in Season 4 of the Boondocks in 2011.
Episodes
Both the comic strip and the cartoon named after it were influenced by McGruder's love of
anime and
manga. He cites
Cowboy Bebop and
Samurai Champloo as sources of inspiration for the series' fight scenes. The opening sequence of season 1 is also remarkably similar to that of
Samurai Champloo, and the opening to season 2 was rather similar to the intro of
Cowboy Bebop, using a trumpet as part of the opening theme mix (The trumpet is a prevalent instrument in
jazz music, which was the primary style of music performed in
Cowboy Bebop's theme and soundtrack). Some of the humor is based on the characters' anime-style movements. The second and third seasons features segments animated by Japanese animation studio
Madhouse. As a result, the following seasons of the series have more detailed animation, as well as minor updates for most of the character designs. Season 3 began airing on May 2, 2010 on Adult Swim and its season finale aired on August 15, 2010.
McGruder was also influenced by Berkeley Breathed's comic strip Bloom County, which ran from 1980 to 1989. Any fan of Bloom County can hear various references and see artistic tributes to Breathed throughout The Boondocks animated series.
Reception
On January 2006,
The Boondocks was nominated for Outstanding Comedy Series at the 37th
NAACP Image Awards, alongside
The Bernie Mac Show, winner
Everybody Hates Chris,
Girlfriends, and
Half & Half. For the episode "Return of the King," the show won a
Peabody Award in 2006. As of July 8, 2010,
The Boondocks had a 72% rating on
MetaCritic, based on 21 reviews.
Critic Jeffrey M. Anderson of the San Francisco Examiner said, "Each episode is beautifully crafted, with an eye on lush, shadowy visuals and a pulsing, jazz-like rhythm... the show is almost consistently funny, consistently brilliant, and, best of all, compulsively watchable."
It was named the 94th best animated series by IGN, who describe it as a sharp satirical look at American society.
Mike Hale of the New York Times has considered The Boondocks among the top television shows of 2010, citing the episode "Pause" as a "painfully funny" satire of Tyler Perry being portrayed as a superstar actor and a leader of a homoerotic cult.
Controversy
McGruder has defended the show's heavy use of the word "
nigga" by arguing that the large-scale usage of the word provides the show with a level of realism, due to the word being commonly used in the everyday conversations of many African Americans.
In 2006, Reverend Al Sharpton protested the Martin Luther King, Jr. character's use of the word "nigga" in the episode "Return of the King". Sharpton felt it defamed the name of King, and sought an apology from the series producers. The controversy was later referred to in the cartoon strip five times and in the TV episode "The Block is Hot" in the form of a morning radio announcement.
According to an article in The Washington Post, references to Rosa Parks were removed from one of the series' completed episodes within a week of her death. In the second episode, "The Trial of R. Kelly", Parks was originally outside the courtroom protesting Kelly when she was hit with a large piece of fried chicken. The scene appears as a deleted scene in the season one DVD set. She is nonetheless seen, unidentified, at the end of the episode being enthusiastically embraced by the woman who had assaulted her with the fried chicken. A bump before the episode originally aired said that Aaron McGruder removed it prior to airing but never said why.
During The Boondocks second season, two episodes were banned from airing without any official word from the network. Originally slated to air on November 16 and December 17, Further, the Season 3 episode "Kentucky Fried Flu" was renamed as Fried Chicken Flu.
Time magazine named The Boondocks as fifth out of 10 of the Most Controversial Cartoons of All Time.
Network
The Boondocks airs on
Adult Swim in the United States,
Teletoon in Canada, and Season 2 has aired on
The Comedy Channel (pay TV network) in Australia.
Sony Entertainment Television broadcasts the show in
Africa on
DSTV. It has also been aired on TV3 and TV6 in
Sweden, on Comedy Central (part of SkyTV) in New Zealand, and on 3+ in Denmark and Russia
The Boondocks is aired on channel
2×2 under the name of
Гетто (
Ghetto in English) , and in France on MCM.
It also airs on Latin American Animax and Sony Entertainment Television Latin America, and in Hungary (under the name of A kertvárosi gettó (The suburban ghetto)) by Animax.
Releases
All three seasons are available on
DVD, with uncensored dialogue. Season 1 was also released on
UMD.
References
External links
The Boondocks at Adult Swim.com
Category:2005 American television series debuts
Category:2000s American animated television series
Category:2010s American animated television series
Category:Adult Swim original programs
Category:American animated television series
Category:American television sitcoms
Category:Anime-influenced animation
Category:Animated sitcoms
Category:Black sitcoms
Category:English-language television series
Category:Peabody Award winning television programs
Category:Satirical television programmes
Category:Television programs based on comic strips
Category:Television series by Sony Pictures Television
![The Boondocks: Rock n' Roll Gangster! [HQ] (Clip-Scene)](http://web.archive.org./web/20110731034017im_/http://i.ytimg.com/vi/iEetuX0865w/0.jpg "The Boondocks: Rock n' Roll Gangster! [HQ] (Clip-Scene)")
![The Boondocks Ending Theme [played on the flute and percussive acoustic guitar]](http://web.archive.org./web/20110731034017im_/http://i.ytimg.com/vi/qYD6UnDI63E/0.jpg "The Boondocks Ending Theme [played on the flute and percussive acoustic guitar]")
