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Last night I watched the premiere of "The Boondocks" animated series on The Cartoon Network. (A BitTorrent link is here.) I'm sure its very difficult to adapt a beloved comic strip to television. As the "Dilbert" show proved, simply adapting a three-panel narrative to a 20 minute TV show has to be a challenge, but I think a greater difficulty is expanding characters with sound and motion without jarring readers' senses of the characters.

Most of my observations about the show probably relate to this challenge of adding context to the characters. Reading the comic strip, I imagine Huey with a more mature-sounding than the Michael Jackson-sounding voice of the TV show, and Riley sounding more overtly angry. It also seems like it would be Riley, not Huey, stalking a banker with a laser sight, and I do think this is deviating from the characters in the comic strip.

Reading the comic strip, I also imagine Woodcrest as a working class suburb (like Sand Springs outside Tulsa or Delaware County, Pa), and I imagine the Freemans living in a slightly dilapidated ranch, rather than a McMansion with granite countertops. Perhaps this is my own work as a reader filling in the gaps, but, if I were going to write a paper about the series, I'd go back to the comic to look for cues about Woodcrest and the house.

I was taking notes while watching the show last night, but I unfortunately didn't take notes of the bumpers, which are edited out of the file available through BitTorrent. The bumpers were silent and featured white text on a black screen, which I think is a marker for the "Adult Swim" programming. The text suggested that Cartoon Network offered programming that was more political and confrontational than other TV outlets. The "Boondocks" pilot didn't strike me as particularly political but I wondered if this was Viacom's effort to attract young left-leaning viewers from Comedy Central, which it once co-owned with Time-Warner.

I was a little disappointed with the first episode, but there were some funny moments in the show. In an early scene, Robert suggests that white people are particularly enamored with gourmet cheese, but Huey retorts, "Granddad, you can’t tame the whole white supremacist power structure with cheese!" In the next scene, Riley says, "I know about white people, too. Like when they talk, they say the whole word," drawing out "whole word." These are the kinds of observations of racial difference viewers expect from Aaron McGruder, and the second joke wouldn't work in the funny papers. Like many TV series, "The Boondocks" needs time to hit its stride. Hopefully, Cartoon Network will give it the chance to hit that stride.