The Boondocks

The Cartoon Network is airing the first cartoon adaptation of Aaron McGruder's comic strip "The Boondocks". This is probably my favorite current strip, though I don't read the funny pages very often anymore. Now Huey is bringing his angry black viewpoint to television, along with his brother Riley and Grandpa. Jasmine didn't make an appearance in the first episode. Regina King does the voices for both Riley and Huey. It works. I don't know what voice I expected for the boys, but they are just kids so a manly James Earl Jones certainly wouldn't work.

Anyway, the first episode has Grandpa invited to a garden party held by the owner of the bank which has the mortgage on his house. Oh, keep in mind that Riley and Huey live with grandpa in an incredibly white neighborhood. The episode opens with Huey having a dream where he tells the truth to white people that Jesus was black, President Reagan was the devil, and the gov't is lying to us about 9/11. The white people riot. When he wakes up Grandpa tells Huey never to tell white people the truth and that he shouldn't even dream about making white people riot. Instead of telling white people the truth, Grandpa says, you should offer whites cheese. It calms them down.

I should be offended by this, but I'm strangely calmed by the thought of cheese.

The isn't consistently funny. The "N" word got thrown around a lot, but it was used casually like it would in real life. The show wasn't as topical or as politically current as the strip, but as McGruder said on Tavis Smiley this week, the show is written a year in advance so it is difficult to truly be topical with the political humor. Plus the shows have storylines rather than fitting ideas into four panels.

We'll see how the show progresses. I want to like this as much as anything else on tv.