Despite a long-running feud with his fellow animation giants, Seth MacFarlane expressed admiration for “South Park” creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker, sharing on “The Town” podcast Thursday that the series’ continued timeliness — and Stone and Parker’s day-to-day involvement — is “incredible.”
In conversation with Puck podcast host Matt Belloni, the “Family Guy” creator’s interview came just a week after the premiere of “South Park” Season 27, which virally skewered President Donald Trump with down-to-the-day accuracy.
“I would never trade our animation team for anything on ‘Family Guy,’ but their production cycle of, what is it, like, two weeks?” he said. “It’s kind of amazing.”
MacFarlane then highlighted some of the production differences between the two series, particularly in terms of their timeline.
“It’s pretty incredible that it’s — yeah, any show that lasts that long is pretty astounding,” he continued. “Our shows take about 10 months to a year to produce each episode, so we have to really kind of guess what the world is going to look like, which obviously gets harder and harder.”
The feud between the two shows began in earnest back in 2006 when an episode of “South Park” – called “Cartoon Wars” – depicted the writers of “Family Guy” as manatees who just select random beach balls with ideas written on them for how the show breaks a story. “Family Guy” fired back in the 2009 episode “Spies Reminiscent of Us” that featured Peter and Quagmire at an improv show where Peter’s decidedly “Family Guy” humor was a success with the audience while Quagmire’s more “South Park”-esque jokes got middling laughs.
“I just want to say for the record right now, we’ve seen Family Guy … we do hate it,” Parker once said.
In a 2012 interview with Rolling Stone, MacFarlane admitted he was not quite sure where the “venom” from the “South Park” creators came from.
“It’d be interesting to know where it comes from because I don’t know them,” he said at the time, but later shared in an interview with Howard Stern that the animosity largely came down to differences in taste.
The Season 27 premiere of “South Park” is the latest viral episode of the show and saw the creators going after Trump and Paramount – which owns the comedy series – unlike ever before. The show depicted Trump in an animation style similar to how they depicted Saddam Hussein years ago – and similarly showed the current U.S. president in an abusive and toxic relationship with Satan.
MacFarlane’s latest project “The Naked Gun,” which he produced, is now in theaters.
