'Family Guy' Characters Star In COVID-19 Vaccine Public Service Announcement

If unvaccinated people grind your gears, then Peter Griffin is coming to the rescue to encourage people to get their COVID-19 vaccine shots.

What Happened: The characters from Seth MacFarlane’s long-running animated Fox FOX series “Family Guy” are starring in a three-and-a-half-minute public service announcement designed to explain how the vaccines work and why it's important to be vaccinated.

Naturally, “Family Guy”-style irreverence permeates this lesson. When Peter asks his doctor how a vaccine works, the physician explains: “Think of the vaccine as a large ethnic bouncer and COVID as the drunken entitled white kid yelling ‘Do you know who my father is?’’

From there, Stewie Griffin and his canine companion Brian get transported into Peter’s bloodstream to illustrate how the vaccine helps the body fight off COVID — albeit with the virus depicted as the always-maligned Meg Griffin and the vaccine as muscular defenders who pulverize the unwanted virus and later pose for selfies with the battered remains of the viral invader.

The PSA also includes a not-subtle dig at talk radio personalities who have raised doubts on the efficacy of the vaccines and a complaint about a boisterous anti-hero character from another long-running Fox animated series.

Why It Matters: The use of animated characters in PSAs can be traced back to World War II, when the medium was created to help motivate Americans to buy government bonds to finance the war effort. One of the most notable PSAs of the era involved the Warner Bros. cartoon characters performing an Irving Berlin tune (although a brief imitation of Al Jolson by Bugs Bunny has been criticized by many film scholars in recent years as being politically incorrect).

Animated PSAs based on the U.S. Forest Service’s PSA character Smokey Bear were ubiquitous in the 1960s and 1970s, and the character’s popularity led to a 1969-70 Saturday morning television show.

And animated PSAs are not unique to the U.S. The Russians had their own (somewhat grisly) PSA designed to discourage youngsters from riding on top of moving trains.