‘Family Guy’ original pilot episode has finally been shared online

The original pilot episode of Family Guy has finally been shared online.

The 1998 episode has only ever been seen before as bonus content in the Family Guy Volume 2 DVD from 2003 and even then it was only the first seven minutes of the pilot’s full 16 minutes.

But fans of the animated show have now unearthed the full episode on the website of Robert Paulsen, one of the animators on the pilot episode. You can view it below.

Creator Seth MacFarlane put the pilot together after Fox gave him $50,000 (£38,699). After liking what they saw, they went ahead with allowing the production of the show to go ahead, which premiered in 1999 with the formal pilot Death Has A Shadow.

Much of the plot from the 1998 version, including Stewie Griffin building a mind-control device and Peter getting wasted at a stag party, also featured in the official pilot. Notably, MacFarlane also voiced Chris Griffin with Seth Green having not been cast as the family’s son yet.

Family Guy is currently in its 23rd season, which you can watch on Disney+ in the UK and Hulu in the US.

Elsewhere, MacFarlane recently said that he doesn’t see “a good reason” to end the show just yet.

He said: “People still love it. It makes people happy and it funds some good causes. It’s a lot of extraneous cash that you can donate to Rainforest Trust and you can still go out to dinner that night.”

MacFarlane added: “There was a time when I thought, it’s time to wrap it up. At this point, we’ve reached escape velocity. I don’t know that there’s any reason to stop at this point unless people get sick of it. Unless the numbers show that people just are, ‘Eh, we don’t care about Family Guy anymore.’ But that hasn’t happened yet.”

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