Planet Family Guy

Stewie's Minions: the first Save Family Guy campaign

By Joe (Friday, September 01, 2000)

In the beginning…Stewie created his E-mail, and we saw that it was good…

The episode was called “Death is a Bitch”. Towards the end of the episode Death, who had been staying at the Griffins to care for his broken ankle gets ready to leave. So they can keep in touch, Stewie gives his email address to Death.

loismustdie@yahoo.com

Then the rush to the computers…

So we all rushed to our computers and what was the first thing we did? Try and get the e-mail name ourselves. Ah…but it was already taken. And that was fine because we now knew we could mail Stewie. So we sent our letters. Mine was short and sweet. Something along the lines of:

Dear Stewie,

I have some ideas on how you can do away with the evil ones. Especially the fat one.

Renfield.

I expected nothing. But a day later an e-mail appeared in my box. From Stewie. I do believe this is the exact moment I lost the ability to distinguish cartoons from “real” people. My doctor has told me the medication I’m now on should help out.

A week passed…and then the most unsettling news…

Family Guy was in jeopardy of being cancelled! How could this be? The mass mail we received from Stewie explained where we could snail mail and e-mail letters to Fox. [read the e-mail] I quickly put together a web site at Geocities that would hopefully spread the word of the
cancellation of the show. I told Stewie the site was up.

And so, “Save Family Guy” was born…

Stewie continued his mass mails and I continued to update the site. Stewie began putting my web address on his e-mails. April 27’th 2000 became the official “Save Family Guy” day and we hit Fox with everything we could. Still no news from Fox. Again on May, 9th 2000 we hit them with what we thought would be our last attempt of letter sending. As of May 29th, the show was not appearing on any of the Fall schedules. This was not a good sign.

Then I was looking around E-Online’s site for Family Guy info when I found a section called “Watch with Wanda”. Wanda hosts a chat every Monday at E-Online where people can ask her questions about TV shows. Someone had asked her what we could do to keep them from canceling FG and she said perhaps to take the same approach that had helped save “Roswell”. Send Fox something, like maybe DIAPERS?!

I wrote Stewie and discussed the new plan with him. And so the diaper campaign was born. Why diapers? With Stewie’s parents possibly out of a job, we wanted to make sure he was properly cared for. I found a site (Diapers
America) where people could buy them online and have them shipped right to Fox. I also implemented the E-mail to Snail mail form. This way people could e-mail me their letters to Fox and I could print them out and mail them to Fox. We did this because it seemed that snail mail would have a bigger impact on Fox. We also had switched our focus from mailing Sandy Grushow to Gail Berman. It was said she may be a fan of the show. Then ifuse.com and E-online both mentioned “Stewie’s Minions” which brought much needed attention to the site. Things were picking up, but still no news from Fox.

And just when we thought it was over…

Finally around July 18th we finally received the news that Family Guy had indeed been renewed for 13 episodes! Two days later the show was nominated for two Emmys! Unfortunately because they waited so long to renew the show we wont see the new episodes until around July of 2001.

And so the site came to an end. The irony that the show being renewed had cancelled my site amused me. I laughed. HAHA <—-
just like that. I then had an overwhelming desire for taffy. It passed (it had to, I had no taffy) and then I slept.

On Thursday, August 31, 2000, Seth MacFarlane did a live chat at Checkout.com. This was his final comment in the chat:

“As I’m sure people are aware that Family Guy has had a rough ride on the air, and it came very close to cancellation. I think the vast numbers of letters that were sent to Fox, in addition to all the diapers and baby food, had a great deal to do with its return. So we thank our fans for being so loyal, and for keeping the show on the air.”