OP-ED: “FANS” Got It All Wrong with “Family Guy ‘Run, Chris, Run'” Clips

Let’s settle this shit right now.

A little over a week ago, FOX aired a brand-new episode of Family Guy entitled “Run, Chris, Run” that featured clips from classic games like NES’ Double Dribble and Tecmo Bowl. The clips were usually involved in paradoxical efforts by the producers of Family Guy to make fun of game glitches that people could take advantage of to win sports games. In Tecmo Bowl, it was simply playing the God-like Bo Jackson, and in Double Dribble it was the corner treys and half-court shots that got the most attention.

Seems legit, right? Well, that is until the internet lost its mind after Youtube/FOX exercised their rights as part of the DMCA act and made sure fan-uploaded clips of the aforementioned Family Guy scenes were taken down. FOX noted that the clips were taken down automatically as because they were fan-uploaded clips of a FOX property. Eventually, after the smoke cleared (like three hours) the videos were re-posted. But, I think FOX was right to take those clips down in the first place…here’s why.

What most people don’t understand is that the problem was less of ‘FOX was removing clips featuring video games’ or the more probable scenario, ‘FOX removing clips of Youtube User Generated Content as featured on Family Guy’. Instead, I think the network was totally in the right to remove user-uploaded clips of Family Guy because the show is in fact FOX copyright and those videos should NOT have been uploaded to begin with.  

In fairness, I could be a bit biased here. I HATE and I mean HATE user-generated uploads of televisions or movies or even music. You ever been on those websites where you can watch movies after clicking through 10,000 ads only to get some guy’s iPhone doing a piss poor job of holding his hand still all the way through the movie? The same stuff happens on Youtube, and I can’t stand it. In this case, fans of Family Guy uploaded scenes from a television show that they in fact did not produce and as a result we got crappy videos. I didn’t even want to bother to go find the videos to post here, because they look so bad that watching them kind of gave me a migraine anyway.  FOX and Youtube were in the right in taking those videos down and as a matter of fact, I would MUCH prefer the Animation Domination Youtube page upload those videos so this way we can get good quality videos, not the crap that’s floating around out there. Moving forward, I think more user-generated videos of people watching TV should be taken down and save us all the trouble of having to sift through your crap to find good quality videos.
The uproar from the people wanting to just want to watch crappy stuff for free was so outlandish, that even Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane had to both comment and intervene in the situation. The poor guy really had nothing to do with the videos being taken down, but I’m sure there were those out there that were ready to lynch Seth at a moment’s notice. But, take it from me folks, FOX/Youtube were right to take those videos down. If anything, you should be contacting FOX and yelling about why we don’t have higher quality videos on the aforementioned Animation Domination Youtube page. If we did that, none of this argument would have even arisen, and then the Family Guy “fans” can go back to complaining about how much better the first three seasons of the show was as compared to now.