Aaron McGruder's strip is finally an animated tv show. It reportedly took him about 18 months to finish the first 15 episodes. This is must see tv!

http://www.adultswim.com/...boondocks/

SUNDAY NIGHT @ 11pm est on Adult Swim (Cartoon Network)
[Edited 11/4/05 9:35am]

hey Dream....Record each episode for a brotha.....LOL

Mailing instructions to follow....

hell yeah, I'm looking forward to it!

it's about DAMN time!!!

looks to "Anime'ish" to me.. and i fuckin despise anime..

DexMSR said:

I can do that.

It's on my Tivo

I heard on the Steve Harvey radio show that Aaron will be using the N-word on the show. This is going to ignite all kinds of controversy, not to mention all of the political commentary.

dreamfactory313 said:

That's why I love this comic strip

October 30, 2005
The Comic-Strip Revolution Will Be Televised
By LOLA OGUNNAIKE
Los Angeles

FANS fearing that "The Boondocks," the wildly scathing, racially
charged comic strip, will lose its bite when it appears on
television next week need not worry. Within the first 10 seconds of
the new show of the same name, viewers will be offered the following
Molotov cocktail of social criticism: "Jesus is black, Ronald Reagan
is the devil and the government is lying about 9/11."

Since its national debut six years ago, the strip, about two black
children living in white suburbia, has slaughtered its share of
sacred cows, eviscerating everyone from Condoleezza Rice and Strom
Thurmond to 50 Cent and Ralph Nader. President Bush has been a
frequent target. As a result, the strip has been suspended, banished
to editorial pages and dropped from some newspapers (it currently
appears in more than 300).

Trying to translate that incendiary spirit into great television
will be a challenge, an expensive challenge at that. Cartoon Network
pays Sony Pictures Television, producer of the series, an estimated
license fee of $400,000 per episode. Add to that the millions the
network has spent on marketing, including many billboards in New
York and Los Angeles trumpeting the show's premiere on Nov. 6 in the
late-night "Adult Swim" block, and "The Boondocks" becomes the most
expensive show the network has made.

"We don't have a lot of money, so we decided that for this year,
we're going to put every dime we have into 'Boondocks,' " said Mike
Lazzo, senior vice president of programming and production at
Cartoon Network.

It remains to be seen if the anime series will become a phenomenon
like Dave Chappelle's "Chappelle's Show" or sputter and die
like "The PJs," Eddie Murphy's animated series about life in the
projects. (Both shows satirized African-American culture and the
culture at large.) "I figure it will either be a big hit or a
massive flop; there is no room for in between," Aaron McGruder,
creator of "The Boondocks," said one recent afternoon in the
windowless warehouse space that serves as his studio here. "I work
presuming horrendous failure and I do my best to prevent that."

Like the strip, the series follows the adventures of Huey Freeman, a
10-year-old militant with the soul of a Black Panther, and his baby
brother, Riley, a cornrow-sporting potty mouth who idolizes gangsta
rappers. The boys live in the suburbs with their stern but loving
grandfather. Played by John Witherspoon (best known for his role as
a sartorially challenged father in the 1992 romantic
comedy "Boomerang"), Granddad is partial to corporal punishment and
exercising in the nude. The actress Regina King ("Jerry Maguire")
gives voice to both Riley and Huey. (The singer Alicia Keys was
originally cast as Huey but dropped out citing scheduling
conflicts.) Unlike the strip, Mr. McGruder said, the series will not
be topical. "We cannot make a show that's going to be dated," he
explained. "It has to survive into syndication and be watchable in
10 years."

Still, it would not be an Aaron McGruder production if it were not
controversial and "The Boondocks" is sure to inspire heated
conversation. One episode imagines the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King
Jr. emerging from a coma, only to find that his pacifism doesn't
play well in the post-Sept. 11 world. No longer a beloved national
hero, he lands on the cover of Time magazine as a traitor. Even
worse, a film about him, directed by Oliver Stone and starring Cuba
Gooding Jr., tanks. Another episode has a self-loathing black man
praying to get into white heaven. In "Guess Hoe's Coming to Dinner,"
Granddad dates a young gold digger who turns out to be a prostitute.
And an episode poking fun at the R&B singer R. Kelly, who is facing
child pornography charges, ends with Huey declaring, "We all know
the nigga can sing, but what happened to standards?"

Mr. McGruder is unapologetic about the use of the N-word in his
series - it appears more than 20 times in one episode, even. "I use
it," he said. "A lot of young black people use it and a lot of old
black people use it. At a certain point it starts to feel fake if
you're not using it."

The furor over the word "speaks to how juvenile racial discourse is
in this country," Mr. McGruder said.

Mr. Lazzo said he was not bothered by the provocative content
of "The Boondocks." "I'm 47 and I grew up with 'All in the Family'
and I remember that show made people laugh and think and that's what
good television does," he said.

Still, Mr. McGruder is willing to make certain concessions to more
delicate sensibilities. When Sony executives asked that he heavily
edit an episode that featured Oprah Winfrey being kidnapped by two
thugs, he did not protest. "They were scared of Oprah, which is
O.K.," he said. "We should all have a healthy fear of Oprah."

"Oprah has the power to lay waste to entire industries with a mere
utterance," Mr. McGruder said, quoting one his show's
characters. "That's a power that you have to respect. And ultimately
I respect it."

That doesn't mean he's gotten softer, though; he views the very
suggestion as a kind of trap. "The same people that question me
about getting soft to get me to say something crazy about Oprah will
turn around and be like, 'Look at what this crazy fool just said
about Oprah!'"

Standing just over 5 feet 7, Mr. McGruder is a slight, handsome man
with small features and slim hands. Dressed in jeans, a Stevie
Wonder T-shirt and horn-rimmed glasses, the cartoonist could easily
pass for a bookish high school sophomore. Unlike his alter ego,
Huey, whose face is all furrowed brow and self-righteous scowl, Mr.
McGruder is quick to smile. One afternoon this month, he was
brimming with opinions. Mr. McGruder on Senator Barack Obama's
chances of ever sitting in the Oval Office: "He's not even going to
be able to smell the White House unless he's a member of Skull and
Bones or any of those close-knit secret societies that really aren't
so secret anymore." Regarding the rapper Kanye West's recent remark
that Mr. Bush doesn't care about black people: "If you're black and
you don't know that by now, you're in trouble. I think it's time
that poor whites start realizing that George Bush doesn't care about
them either and he will let them die too."

Those who work with Mr. McGruder say that his passion for politics
is infectious. "Since meeting Aaron," Ms. King said, "I've started
listening to NPR. He inspires you to want to go out and learn more."

Born on the South Side of Chicago and raised in the middle-class
suburb of Columbia, Md., an area that bears more than a passing
resemblance to the bucolic Boondocks, Mr. McGruder began drawing as
a child. In high school he listened intently to the black
nationalist-inspired rhymes of rap groups like Public Enemy, X-Clan
and Poor Righteous Teachers. During his years as an African-American
studies major at the University of Maryland, Mr. McGruder said, he
flirted with the idea of becoming "a spokesman for the people." The
life expectancy of that gig, however, proved an insurmountable
deterrent. "Usually if you're doing that job well, you're dead by
34, which is not in my plans," he said.

Instead, he set out to create a spokesman who could not be
assassinated: an adorable, opinionated, elementary school kid with
not-so-elementary insights about race, class and culture. The first
person to put "The Boondocks" in print was a college student named
Jayson Blair, who was then editor of The Diamondback, the campus
paper at the University of Maryland. Mr. McGruder proudly recalled
persuading Mr. Blair to pay him $30 per strip, $17 more than his
fellow cartoonists were receiving at the time. Years later, Mr.
Blair, hired by this paper and then resigned after fabricating
stories, would be lampooned in the strip he help put on the
map. "You can actually look at Jayson Blair and say, 'Wow, you set
black people back,' " Mr. McGruder said, shaking his head. "A lot of
people are accused of that, but he actually did it."

"The Boondocks" went national in 1999 and its creator quickly became
a personality. Books of his cartoons, like "Birth of a Nation"
and "A Right to Be Hostile," soon followed.

This is not the first time Mr. McGruder has tried to turn his strip
into a television show. From the fall of 2003 to the summer of 2004,
he worked on a six-minute pilot for Fox. He described the process in
a word: "hellish." "It was an incredibly difficult time for me," he
said. "I was worked half to death all the time. I was a zombie. I
was mean. I was miserable."

Mr. McGruder said he had seriously contemplated walking away from
his strip. Or getting himself fired: "I didn't want to quit, but if
they threw me out then I'm a martyr," he reasoned. As it turned out,
however, the angrier and more frustrated he grew, the better his
work got. "Going as far as I can with my own creative instincts has
generally only paid off," he said with a rueful shrug.

When Fox passed on the show, Mr. Lazzo contacted the cartoonist and
asked to look at the pilot. "It felt networky," Mr. Lazzo
recalled. "Aaron's voice felt watered down." Because cable is less
restrictive, he said, "we were able to say, 'Make the show you want
to make, Aaron.' "

These days it is not uncommon for Mr. McGruder and his illustrator,
Carl Jones, to write a week's worth of comic strips in one
day. "We're juggling so many things," Mr. Jones said. "You have no
idea how crazy it can get." Already Cartoon Network has asked Mr.
McGruder for another season of scripts. When not working on the
strip or the series, Mr. McGruder is fiddling with a movie script
about black fighter pilots in World War II.

Friends and family rarely see him. "Sometimes he works so hard, he
gets sick," Ms. King said. "Like a big sister, I'm always asking
Aaron if he's getting any sleep." The answer, he said, is not
yet. "I made the decision early on that I was going to work myself
to death now, so that I don't have to wait until 65 to enjoy my
life," Mr. McGruder said. "I'm trying to live well, and there is no
freedom in America if you're economically bound to the system."



a.. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Tonight, my friends!! TONIGHT!!

I'm a little nervous. I tend to almost always agree with Entertainment Weekly's reviews and they are NOT impressed with the 2 episodes which were screened for them...You know how it goes, though, it may take a while for the show to find its feet...

here's the review:
ps-this gives away a lot of points from the 1st eps, read at your own risk

The Boondocks

Reviewed by Gillian Flynn



Maybe that handful of little squares each day are enough. The Boondocks — Aaron McGruder's sometimes scorching, often controversial (and by some papers, outright canceled) comic strip about two young African-American brothers transplanted to the suburbs — gains much of its power from the bluntness required by such limited space. There's something inherently shocking about a still image of 10-year-old militant Huey Freeman muttering a single line succinctly slamming President Bush's politics or uttering oaths against the white power structure.

It takes more to sustain 20 minutes of animated story, and so far The Boondocks — part of Cartoon Network's Adult Swim lineup — isn't holding up. The manga-style animation is true to the strip, as is the setup: Huey and his 8-year-old brother, Riley (both voiced by Ray's Regina King), live in a lily white Chicago suburb with their cranky granddad, Robert (voiced by Friday's John Witherspoon), resenting every second. Unfortunately, the series' first two episodes are missing the pointy observations so thick in McGruder's strip. Instead, they feel airless, settling for obvious laughs, none of which seem particularly surprising: Granddad, Huey, and Riley are invited to a garden party by a neighboring banker, Ed Wuncler, who looks just like Ed Asner — Asner also supplies the voice — but are initially denied entrance because they're black. Huey is told several times by patronizing white people that he ''speaks so well.'' We've seen this stuff many times before — McGruder can do better. (Although his more absurdist humor, like having Granddad swear that he can calm a white man by offering him gourmet cheese, hits the mark.)

Episode 2, in which Granddad deludes himself that hot new girlfriend Cristal isn't really a hooker, has a few more laughs but is further from the spirit of the Boondocks strip. It has, in fact, an adult, Three's Company vibe, with a mistaken identity, scandalized, clued-in loved ones, and obvious omens overlooked, like when a waiter turns to Granddad's date and queries, ''Doggie bag?'' To which Cristal (''like the champagne,'' she says, in a joke straight from Showgirls, which can't be good) quotes a price.

In the end, The Boondocks simply feels off — Kanye West's ''Gold Digger'' kicks off a montage scene, only to be followed by piano tinkling reminiscent of the Peanuts cartoons. Mediocre jokes are zapped by liberal use of the N-word — McGruder, like the South Park creators, gleefully exploits cable's broader allowances. But maybe not enough. Despite its wish to be incendiary, Boondocks seems hesitant — the one thing McGruder's never been. Grade: C

dreamfactory313 said:

he was on tavis smiley the other night talkin about that exact thing
heres the transcript link http://www.pbs.org/kcet/t...ipt.html#2

Moonwalkbjrain said:

Thanx 4 the link. I didnt know that Dennis Archer was on the show too.

Much respect. I'll get cable for this.