Boondocks Eval-Unit 3 teachers draft
Mike Francois
Leston
English 1000c
4/26/08
Evaluating “The Boondocks”
Provocative, controversial, hilarious, and raunchy are just a few words that you describe the adult cartoon series called “The Boondocks”. “The Boondocks” started out as a black and white comic strip by Aaron McGruder in 1999 in the “The Diamondback” the newspaper at the University of Maryland, College Park where McGruder attended. Now the strip has found a home in many of our nation’s newspapers.
In 2005 “The Boondocks” made a transition from print to animation and never looked back. The series is known as the nation’s first hip-hop cartoon. McGruder and Sony television teamed up to create an animated series that shows the plight of young Huey Freeman and company. The comic strip heavily focused on the main character of ten-year old Huey Freeman and his views on society, while the animated series put more emphasis on all of the characters not just Huey. Huey, Riley, Granddad, Jasmine, Uncle Ruckus, are all focused on a little more. Huey and Riley are brothers from Southside Chicago who, after their parents passed away were moved from Chicago to suburbs of Woodcrest to live with their grandfather Robert Freeman. Huey’s best friends Cesar who was in the comic strip was omitted and replaced by his new neighbor Jasmine Dubois. Cesar is only seen in one episode of the animated series. Many famous actors and comedians do the voices for the shows characters with names such as Samuel L. Jackson, Regina King, and John Witherspoon. “The Boondocks” creator Aaron McGruder has everyone from the thug on the streets to the businessman on Wall Street reading his witty brand of hip-hop humor”.(Mosley)
The opening theme coincides so well with Huey’s personality if you have ever read the comic strip. The first episode took no time off in telling you why the show is provocative, and so controversial; during a garden party Huey steps onto a stage and says “Jesus was black”, “Ronald Regan was the devil”, and “the government lied about 9/11”, causing a riot. It was all a dream, Huey is awoken by his grandfather and tells him not even to dream about telling white people the truth. Granddad does taebo naked, and Riley shoots Wuncler’s grandson through a window, this can all be found in the first [episode]
“The series is beautiful; the animation was crafted with care and the backgrounds shimmer in a way that is reminiscent of some recent Japanese animation (like Last Exile), which is fitting, as the character designs have always drawn inspiration from anime and manga. The characters are apt visual representations from the series and the art design remains true to the strip. Those things work in the show’s favor” (Karabinus).
As we see in the first couple episodes Huey is young but very wise for his age, his radical, militant, and the wanting to take down of the white power structure shows that he is the voice of rationality. Riley represents the misguided black youth of America today who all want to do what they see rappers do in music videos, while Granddad is the old school romanticist. Ruckus is a self-loathing black man who is racist towards black people and preaches white supremacy. In the second episode granddad falls in love with a gold-digging, money grubbing hooker. The boys wait out his obsession until she finally confesses to being a hooker, after her pimp came looking for her. “Granddad is trying to save the boys from the wrong crowd; and, unexpectedly, they’re trying to save him from the same”, says Matthew Gilbert from the Boston Globe.
“The Boondocks”, being the first hip-hop cartoon, is supposed to target a specific audience. “The Boondocks” is definitely not a kid’s show. It targets mostly minorities, from the ages of eighteen to about thirty. Even thought the show was supposed to target a specific audience, it has attracted many different races, age groups, and genders; male, female, white, Hispanic, 15 year olds to 35 year olds. People just love to watch the antics of the Freeman family. The show is one of those many things in life that you love or hate, but you just can’t stop watching. “The Boondocks” is one of those things that goes against the social norm, but people are still attracted to it; the show is like a bad car accident, people don’t want to know what happened or to be involved, but just can’t turn their eyes away. It’s the same way with “The Boondocks”, some people might want to turn away but they just can’t. Others think that McGruder’s television series lacked the bite that the comic strip had. “Despite its wish to be incendiary, Boondocks seems hesitant — the one thing McGruder’s never been” (Flynn). If people give the show a chance they will be able to get the message that the show tries to get across with its unorthodox methods of racism, political and social satire, and through the pure joy of comedy. In an interview Reginald Hudlin, the executive producer on the TV series gives his reason to McGruder on why “The Boondocks” is such a [hit]
“When I showed my brother, Warrington [a filmmaker], “The Boondocks” books and he was reading them, he said, “You know, Aaron gives me hope for this generation.” And it really is true because your work epitomized all the principles of my own personal aethetic code, which is that it is funny. It is political. It is human. And it is genuinely original. The characters are [real]. You’re willing to have the protagonists be flawed characters. You are a genuinely courageous person, and willing to say what most people think, and says it in a very clever original way, which is why this strip is such a huge success” (Anderson).
Many people think that “The Boondocks” were terrible ever since the beginning, some newspapers even banned the comic-strip from their pages, but now with the creation of the TV show, comes a lot more criticism and a lot more reviews. “The Boondocks” are a cartoon but isn’t intended for kids. Its main characters are African-American and fit a lot of the stereotypes that black people in America hate. Riley is a wanna-be and Huey is a radical. The two brothers connect two different decades of culture. Huey represents the struggle of civil rights, while Riley represents how the young black youth of today is corrupted by what they watch on TV. Just like Gilbert from the Boston Globe said, ““The Boondocks” is a warm bath of a show — if you don’t mind sharing the tub with a plugged-in radio”. A lot of African-American’s hate the show because they think that it allows white people to use racial slurs just because it is on TV, and allows “White America” to poke at and make fun of the black population in the United States. The controversial series went off without a hitch it first season, with its hilarious episodes, but when the second season came around Sony and McGruder ran into some problems. BET or the organization known as Black Entertainment Television threatened to sue McGruder and Sony over two episodes from season two. BET claimed that the episodes were defamation of character, so Sony pulled the episodes off the air.
Personally I am a huge fan of the television series and the comic strip, I love how the characters are portrayed and when you think about it you can relate some of the characters to individuals that you know form your own life. There are millions of people out there who feel the same way I do, and there are others who feel opposite. Some bloggers responded to a forum “One more reason to hate BET… (The Boondocks)”; If anything this just shows more love than hate for the show. I was going around the Internet and surfing random blogs with the tag “boondocks” and there were hundreds, upon hundreds of people saying good things about the show. I don’t know why people hate the show, but I do have an educated guess. In my opinion people don’t like “The Boondocks” because it portrays what has really become of America (or what is becoming of America), the controversy, language, and social satire is what is becoming of our nation; and these people that don’t like the show is probably because they don’t like change (baby boomers). We as a nation are meshing together and interracial couples are not seen as outcast, as they were forty to fifty years ago. If you were to go around St. Johns University and ask students if they liked the show, an overwhelming percent would probably say that they love the show; but if you to ask the professors the same question they would say what’s “The Boondocks”? , “I saw it once, I didn’t think it was that funny”, or “I didn’t like it”. “The Boondocks” wasn’t created for the baby boomers it was created for my generation and future generations because that’s the direction the series is headed is towards the future; If the creators wanted middle-aged people to watch, then why would they put the series on Cartoon Network? , and if they wanted young children to watch they wouldn’t put it on late night on Adult Swim. It’s all simple logic, and it appears to me that these creators and producers might have helped write the book on logic itself or just had some really good people in the marketing department.
“The Boondocks” is funny, racist, controversial, provocative, and just down right stupid depending on who you ask. Then I saw this one blog post that cleared up the whole situation a little bit. “…But everyone’s voice of reason is different, not everyone has the same morals…” I then realized that this internet personality was right everyone has different morals, and different people have different views on what is considered comedy and what is considered over the edge. Ironically, I found this post on a thread labeled “Anyone else hate Boondocks cartoon?”
Works Cited
Hawk, Michael. “Anyone else hate Boondocks cartoon”. Newsarama. 19 Mar 2006. 26 April 2008. <http://forum.newsarama.com/showthread.php?t=63546&page=2>
Flynn, Gillian. “The Boondocks.” Entertainment Weekly. 04 Nov 2005. 23 April 2008. <http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,1125644,00.html>.
Karabinus, Alisha. “TV Review: The Boondocks.” Blog Critics Magazine. 07 Nov 2005. 23 April 2008. <http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/11/07/132938.php>.
Mosley, Nicole. “From the Boondocks: Interview with Aaron McGruder”. The Spokesman. 13 April 2001. 26 April 2008. < http://media.www.msuspokesm an.com/media/storage /paper270/news/2001/04/13/Features/From>
Anderson, Sara. “Pop Culture Reginald Hudlin and Aaron McGruder”. USA Weekend Magazine. Jan 10 2002. 28 April 2008. <http://www.usaweekend.com/02_issues/020217
/020217bhm_pop.html>
All pictures provided were from Google, and the video provided was from Youtube.
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