Oddly enough, there actually is a “Zombie Jesus” website. zombiejesus-dot-com, if you please. It’s not working at the moment, though.
Want to hear another eerie “Family Guy”/9.11 factoid? On an episode where Loid gets a job as a flight attendant…
[spoiler]…She enters the cockpit of the plane to find the Pilot and Co-pilot, laying apparently dead in their seats, each man pincushoned with several bloody daggers…of course, when Lois starts to panic, the flight crew starts cracking up, and they detach the rubber Knives-with-bloodstains™ that they’d glued to themselves, chuckling over how well they’d “got” her.
And when I saw the episode for the first time, I had actually thought "Oh, like anyone would try and hijack an airliner with knives, of all things…
Yipes.
[/spoiler]
One of the problems was the Cartoon Network’s target audience was children back when it was first formed and apparantly were forced to carve their broadcast guidlines in stone over at Time Warner headquarters in consideration of that fact.
Fast forward 10 years when they do want to attract an older audience and they have a really hard time because, as I understand it, AOL Time Warner wont let them rewrite those out of date guidlines. As I understand it the good people at Cartoon Network and the various shows that do push the limits are not very happy about situation.
I used to hear this all the time over at the Toonzone forums.
You know what I find fascinating? Once Tivo devices really become commonplace, we won’t have “late night” and “prime time” and the “family hour”. Broadcasters will have to assume anyone can be watching at any time, so there’s no more “but what kid is watching a show that is on at 11:30pm?” . Sure, you can timeshift with a VCR now, but its a million times easier with a digital recorder.
Yeah, don’t blame the CN guys, blame the Time Warner corporate drones for the lack of “Jesus.” “Rejected” got pulled at the last minute (they had been airing promos for it all week and I was very excited about seeing it again) because somebody in the TW-AOL brass got wind that the word “Jesus” was in it. Apparently “My anus is bleeding!” is kosher, but you can’t use the word “Jesus” on what was supposed to be a children’s network. The whole thing turned into a pissing match, and “Rejected” got pulled to show how much pull some goddamned executive had. Then, because they had to be “consistent”, they started blanking out the “Jesus” from “Sweet zombie Jesus!” on Futurama, which had aired without fuss on Fox years ago.
Bit of a hijack, from the turn of the conversation…
That episode rocks… one of Mrs. Prefect’s and my favourite lines of all time comes from that episode, “Pus and Blood! I am in Hell!”
I miss that show.