Clearpost.online It's your post, so post it!

A fresh win in the realm of lost media this week, as online detectives have stumbled onto an unlikely find: The full version of the $50,000 pilot episode of Family Guy that Seth MacFarlane created to sell Fox execs on the series way back in early 1998. The first seven minutes of the episode, a rougher version of what would eventually beco*e the animated series’ formal pilot, “Death Has A Shadow,” has been circulating for years, having been included on the show’s “Volume 2” DVD sets. But the rest of the 16-minute animation, which MacFarlane made for miniscule amounts of money after Fox execs saw his earlier Larry And Steve shorts, has remained a question mark for the last 20 years.

Until this week, that is, per the Lost Media Wiki. As is often the case with this kind of re-discovered find, the full version of the demo was discovered in a fairly random and innocuous place, i.e., the web site of animator Robert Paulson. (Not, we feel like it’s important to clarify, the well-known voice actor Rob Paulsen, of Pinky And The Brain fame.) Paulson, who’s credited for digital inks and paints and co*positing on the episode, apparently uploaded the video to his work portfolio back in 2022, but it went undiscovered for several years, until it was recently found by user GhostTheDeadGirl of the Lost Media Wiki’s Discord.

Watching the full version of the pilot now, it’s notable that, for as rough as the animation is, a ton of the overall Family Guy sensibility was intact even then. (The most off-putting change, also notable in the previous 7-minute version, is hearing MacFarlane do the voice of Chris, Seth Green having not yet been brought on for the series.) There are quite a few jokes where the punchline differs from the one that would eventually be broadcast—with a major dose of hype after the Super Bowl in 1999—though, including the fact that the original version of the epis0de-closing “Oh no!” gag didn’t include its most Family Guy-esque touch, the sudden reality-breaking appearance of the Kool-Aid Man.

So, yeah: One more item checked off the “supposedly lost media” checklist.