Why does the boondocks take so long

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Tweets by iowastatedaily. McGruder now has a growing empire that includes -- in adition to the strip and TV show -- four books and an agreement with Sony Pictures Animation to produce an animated film version of "The Boondocks.

For all the controversy his show and strip may continue to spark, McGruder is aware he may also draw praise from both longtime fans and critics. However, he tries not to dwell too much on any accolades.

So it seems that McGruder is also an equal-opportunity critic -- on himself. Even he cannot escape Huey's wrath. We'll notify you here with news about. Turn on desktop notifications for breaking stories about interest? Comments 0. Part of what makes The Boondocks, the animated series, so special is its voice cast. The main characters are young siblings Huey and Riley Freeman.

The two are quite different — Huey is politically informed, well-read, and hyper-intelligent, while his little brother Riley is obsessed with rap music and hip-hop culture. The two feel like they're related, though, in part because their voices bear an underlying similarity, a feat achieved by having the same actor play both roles. And that's a happy accident. Initially, producers sought out different performers to play each part.

But then King read Huey's lines, and the showrunners couldn't find anybody who could top King's take on the character, and they hired her to play both boys. The Boondocks began life as a comic strip, and proving its success in that medium, it followed predecessors like Peanuts and Garfield into animated television.

However, that wasn't a fringe benefit or the natural result of expansive popularity. McGruder had intended for The Boondocks to be a TV show when he formulated the idea, and a strip was a means to an end. Still, even with a well-known comic as source material, McGruder struggled to get a show made. According to an interview with The A. Club , McGruder unsuccessfully attempted to sell the show for "over five or six years" before selling the idea to Sony Pictures Television.

That's when Adult Swim jumped in and bought the show, debuting it in And interestingly, he retained an executive producer credit through the first two seasons of The Boondocks during its Adult Swim years. That was an obligated relic of his work on the Fox incarnation because he didn't work on the show after that.

Club of Hudlin in In the second season, the show took aim at Black Entertainment Television, calling it out as a harmful force to the African-American community. In fact, one episode shows BET executives actively conspiring toward "the destruction of Black people. According to the Los Angeles Times , when executives at the real-life channel heard about these episodes, they called Turner Broadcasting parent company of Adult Swim and Boondocks studio Sony Pictures Television and insisted they not be broadcast, threatening a lawsuit.

As creator of The Boondocks, strip and show, Aaron McGruder was one of the most powerful and influential Black voices of 21st-century culture, not unlike like Tyler Perry , the writer, actor, and TV series creator best known for his morality dramedies starring himself as an old woman named Madea , as well as his TBS sitcoms House of Payne and Meet the Browns.

So that made things interesting in when the Boondocks episode " Pause " co-written by McGruder hit the airwaves. Along the way, Jerome propositions Granddad, and viewers learn that the guy's whole deal is that he uses religion and drag to hide the fact that he's gay. The real Perry took offense and objected to his and McGruder's mutual bosses at Turner.

Long gaps between seasons are to be tolerated with a smile. And yet, it is not. Or at least, not as much as it should or could be.

Sundays is more than ever an opportunity missed. In its debut season, which aired in , creator Aaron McGruder successfully undertook the huge task of translating his daily cartoon strip into an animated series by turning it into a satire of black family life — featuring Robert Freeman and his grandsons Huey and Riley, who move from the city to the suburbs — with occasional forays into broader cultural commentary.

This is, of course, ancient stuff by now — both the conceit and the jokes. The episode felt like a deliberate placeholder, a bridge-gapper to help the show evolve from Dubya-era skepticism to Obama-era optimism, or Obama-era skepticism, or Obama-era something else. A little redundancy could be forgiven.