From YouTube.com user: peterg14

This is the first of two clips from YouTube poster peterg14 of Aaron McGruder’s popular and controversial cartoon on Adult Swim called The Boondocks. Renowned for its racy language and subject matter, the show pushes social, racial and political boundaries in a smart and over the top kind of way that both shocks and educates the lucky viewers of the program. So much so that the fascinatingly-coiffed civil rights leader Al Sharpton spoke out against the show’s overuse of the very word that has made former Seinfeld star Michael Richards quite infamous as of late.

The show revolves around two African-American brothers just moved from the inner-city to an outlying suburb called Woodcrest in search of a better life with their grandfather. The boys, Huey and Riley Freeman, are ten and eight years old respectively and on opposite sides of the American black experience in cities throughout the country. Huey is the militant and socially conscious deep thinker who idolizes revolutionaries like Che Guevara, Malcolm X, and Sitting Bull. And Riley, his wild younger brother, is a wannabe gangster deeply influenced by the media’s proliferation of a negative and violent black stereotype seen in rap videos and movies.

Throughout their travels, the boys quickly find out that life in the suburbs is much different than what they’ve come to expect in the city. And as a consequence they often find themselves at odds with the good people of Woodcrest over a number of socially divisive issues. In this particular episode one of the boy’s neighbors is picked up by the police for fitting the general description of a recent “X-Box Killer,” and the boys are asked to help get him out of the jam. But what’s so good about this episode is that it quickly becomes a giant analogy for the United States Government’s search for Osama Bin-Laden and the subsequent war in Iraq that followed.

Enlisted to help are fellow Woodcrestian gangsters Gin Rummy and Ed Wuntscler—two characters who serve as caricatures of US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsefeld and President George Bush. Wuntscler (played by Charlie Murphy of Chappelle’s Show fame) is the dim heir to the Wuntscler family fortune who continually gets a free pass for his deviant behavior because of his father’s influence in the town. Gin Rummy (played by Samuel L. Jackson) is Ed’s fast-talking friend who is the brains behind the criminal schemes the two are always immersed in.

At the end of the episode the entire crew ultimately finds themselves in a drawn-out shootout after Ed and Rummy abort their original mission and attempt to rob a local convenient store owned by a man who looks a lot like Saddam Hussein. Of course, the Hussein-like character and his friends offer fierce resistance to the takeover and the X-Box Killer is all but forgotten as the combatants and the townspeople turn their attention to the epic battle taking place in the convenient store…

This episode is brilliant, simply put, and is a great introduction to one of the best shows on television today. That said, I sincerely hope you enjoy it as much as I have.

Labels: aaron mcgruder, animated, boondocks, comedy, ethan, peterg14