Family Guy

Family Guy. “Don’t Make Me Over.”

Season 4, Volume Three, Disc One, DVD. 6/5/05

Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation: Beverly Hills, CA. 2005.

“America loves hott white jailbait ass”-of course we do. This episode of family guy plays off of the hegemonic ideologies of how attractive, young females should present themselves in our society. Maggie Griffin gets shut down by the class hunk when she asks him out on a date, leading her to believe that she is not beautiful based on the hegemonic ideologies that have been placed on her, her family, and friends by our society.

When Maggie comes home in tears to her family, informing them of her being rejected by Craig Hoffman, she looks to her parents for comfort and support. Maggie is quickly insulted by her father, insinuating that she probably is ugly given that the popular kid in class wouldn’t go out with her. Mrs. Griffin offers to take Maggie shopping to improve her appearance, instead of consoling her daughter and assuring her that she is in fact beautiful and a wonderful person. Mrs. Griffin builds upon the gender hegemonic ideology that young ladies must look a certain way to be considered attractive in order to compete for attention. Mrs. Griffin offers lower rider jeans and baby tees with suggestive statements as smart purchases during their trip to the mall.

As Maggie changes her image, others notice. Her crush, Craig Hoffman asks her out, and a group of upper class, white, popular girls invites Maggie to hang out. “Now that you’re attractive how about we go out sometime?”- With the hegemonic ideologies of class seen here, it clearly shows how an upper class group of individuals only can been seen or interact with another idealistic attractive person. Maggie remains the same person, however since she changed her image; she was able to climb the social class.

Peter decides to start a rock band on account of his success with his friends on karaoke night at the updated Drunken Clam. Their band, “Fat Horny Black and Joe” is everything that we have been bred to believe. Fat Peter Griffin is a fat version a Devo, a band popular for the song Whip It, in the 1980s. Horny Quagmire is dressed as Tommy Lee, given the fact that he just was diagnosed with hepatitis. Black Cleveland Brown, a stretch, is dressed in a tight white disco outfit with a huge afro. And Joe, the paraplegic is the white 80s hair band keyboardist. They all fit into the ideologist ideas of ethnicity and race that our society holds. But hey, “it doesn’t matter what you wear as long as you play kick ass rock and roll…”, it does matter. We’ve made it matter.

As the band rolls up to their first gig at Rhode Island State Penitentiary a sign reads, “Minorities Welcome” taking the thought that only minorities commit crimes and that they are more likely to do so. The hegemonic ideologies of race are highlighted here and also show our unjustified presumptions of prisoners.

Lastly, Dr. Diddy makes an appearance in the show, with his backwards hat, gold chains, and slang language. Brian the dog aggressively barks at him, cracking at the idea that dogs are racist. When in fact Brian is in a predominately white neighborhood setting, so he just fears and untrust what he doesn’t know. However the show tries to make a joke off of an ideology that we tend to keep in our society.