Huge Family Guy fan here. Who isn’t? Bad, mean, wretched people. That’s who. So color me terribly amused when I just happened upon an interview in which the show’s creator, Seth MacFarlane, goes on a rant about an ’80s Saturday morning cartoon called…wait for it…Rubik, the Amazing Cube:
They did an animated series in the ’80s that was based on the Rubik’s Cube, which was popular at the time. The premise was — I’m not making this up — that these three Hispanic children find a Rubik’s Cube, and every time they solve it, it flies and helps them solve crimes. I swear it’s real. Look it up on YouTube. It’s ridiculous.
So look it up on youtube, I did. And wiki. The thing is just plain horrible. To begin with, why Hispanics (a progressive step, an irrelevant foil, or just plain odd)? Why the anthropomorphized cube? Nerdy. But, even more so, creepy. The partial episode on youtube is as bad as you’d expect. But I do have to admit that the Menudo-performed theme song is so bad as to almost be spectacularly awesome.
MacFarlane couldn’t let this silly 80s cartoon disappear into the pile of euthanized silly 80s cartoons. Just too much grist for the mill. So, he squeezed the personified cube into a 16-second cameo in a Family Guy episode (“Peter-Assment” – Season 8, Episode 14):
Probably because of the expletive, but perhaps because of its too-random-for-even-Family-Guy nature, the clip appears on only the DVD version of the episode.
And the icing on the cake? There’s even a youtube clip of MacFarlane comparing Bill O’Reilly to the face of Rubik, the Amazing Cube:
Goodonya, Seth. Goodonya.
adventures in cubing 