Trump Guy (Family Guy)

Trump Guy
You know you've failed when neither party liked this episode.
Series: Family Guy Part of Season: 17 Episode Number: 11 Air Date: January 13, 2019 Writer: Patrick Meighan Director: Joe Vaux Previous episode: Hefty Shades of Grey Next episode: Bri, Robot

Trump Guy is the eleventh episode of the seventeenth season of Family Guy. The episode takes place after Hefty Shades of Grey.

Plot

The Griffins move to Washington D.C. where Peter is hired as the new White House Press Secretary.

Why It's No Trump Guy

1. Just like "Christmas Guy" and "Ratings Guy", The title of the episode is unoriginal, as there are already tons of episodes that take the name of the show and replace the first word or change a letter in the second word.
   • Besides, it can make trying to look up episodes to watch somewhat difficult.
2. The design for Donald Trump isn't very good. He looks like Ganon from A Link to the Past mixed with Tubba Blubba from Paper Mario wearing a coif.
3. It's 22 minutes of nothing but Trump hate and Trump mockery without a lot of good jokes. Not even the Animaniacs reboot made Trump jokes at a poor or unfunny taste.
   • Most of the jokes on Trump are predictable with most of them having already been done to death by other shows. Trump has orange skin, Trump is a racist jerk, Trump is a pervert, Trump is overweight. You can tell where this is going.
   • Considering it takes 10 months to animate Family Guy episodes, many of the Trump jokes were already somewhat overdone or dated.
4. When the jokes aren't involving Trump, they're just as bad as most modern Family Guy jokes.
   • The CNN part goes way too long, and it only serves as nothing but filler.
   • One of the cutaways is just a live action movie that's subtitled, which feels out of place for a Family Guy joke. Animating the whole sequence would have made it a bit more better.
5. The fourth wall is broken too much in this episode, and also very poorly:
   • After the intro, (what would've been) an episode recap is interrupted when an off-screen director asks Stewie to redo his lines. After a few seconds of silence, Stewie refuses and the episode resumes.
   • The episode would occasionally cut to Brian, Chris, or Vladmir Putin in a writing room taking credit for some scenes they wrote in the episode.
6. The jab against Bob's Burgers isn't that funny. It only serves to grind the episode to a halt.
   • Plus, when Trump says Bob's Burgers is his favorite show, Peter responds by remarking that the Emmy voters should remember that fact the next time they consider nominating Bob's Burgers. It's everyone's right to say that they dislike even the most well-liked shows, but insinuating that a show doesn't deserve praise just because a very unpopular person is a fan of it is just dumb. Judging a work's quality by the kind of people who enjoy the show makes about as much sense as assuming that being a feminist automatically makes you a misandrist. It's the creators' opinion if they don't like Bob's Burgers, but they went way out of line by resorting to the association fallacy when decrying it.
7. As great as the Chicken fight sequences are, it feels like it has been done to death by this point and at this day and age. But also here, this feels like a complete parody of its original concept, except with Donald Trump.
8. The episode stated that they were trying to go away from making jokes about homosexuals, but the later episodes don't seem to follow up on that claim, This was proven by Peter saying they'll phase out the gay jokes, but later in the episode, "Disney's The Reboot", when one of the focus group watchers mentions what Peter says, Peter responds by saying that line was "taken out of context and largely misunderstood", even though that was the exact context of that scene. This means the writers either changed their minds or they lied.
9. This episode feels like a rip-off of "Two Bad Neighbors" from The Simpsons as both episodes involve similar plots and ideas from each other.
   • The Simpsons meets a president (George H.W. Bush), the president attacks Bart and Homer, and the president fights to the death. Almost all of these elements were used in this episode.
   • But unlike "Two Bad Neighbors", "Trump Guy" was made during Trump's presidency in the United States, and that he was not ex-president at the time. Even though that does not date the episode by all means, it's still used as an excuse from the writers of the show to play more stupid Donald Trump jokes in either desperate ways to get laughs from their viewers, or by making viewers cringe 22 minutes straight, or by trying to make you as obsessively leftwing as possible in order to find all the Trump jokes in the episode funny.
10. The line "We're a cartoon. You can turn us off." is rather laughable.
11. The “We’re a cartoon” line alongside the bashing of Bob’s Burgers I’m this episode shows that the writers of the show are stating that they are not going to listen to any criticism towards Family Guy, especially criticism directed towards it for resorting to mean spirited tones often.

Redeeming Qualities

1. Trump's voice in this episode isn't by all means terrible.
   • "You can't walk out on me, I'm the president!"
2. The Griffins are likable and actually care that Meg was touched by Trump, (though not at first) and half of them (Peter, Lois, and Brian) aren’t flanderized like they usually are.
3. Peter acknowledged that they were trying to stop making gay jokes, However this would later get contradicted (See WIS point #8.)
4. There are some funny scenes, such as Trump putting his hair in a cotton candy machine, Peter mistaking a butternut squash for Trump and Peter kissing Obama's portrait.
5. The scene where Ernie the Giant Chicken and his kid are in the space museum both learning about Neil Armstrong (the first man who walked on the moon) is kind of heartwarming.
6. Seven words: "Why are we so damn divided America?!"
7. The Donald Trump vs Peter fight, despite being done to death, is still hilarious.

Reception

Trump Guy received negative reviews from critics and fans of Family Guy, many called it one of the worst, if not, the worst episode of Family Guy. The episode was given a 5.7/10 rating on IMDb and was also ranked as the 10th worst adult cartoon episodes of any show by PhantomStrider.

References

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9213080/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ITZ_JdDLZU?t=49

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