The Boondocks
Aaron McGruder's anime-styled Adult Swim satire about Huey and Riley Freeman, two Chicago kids transplanted with their Granddad to a white suburb called Woodcrest, with Regina King voicing both brothers. It opened in 2005 by declaring "Jesus was Black, Ronald Reagan was the devil, and the government is lying about 9/11," and it never got less confrontational.
The Boondocks began as a comic strip, first on the early music website Hitlist.com and in The Source magazine, then in newspaper syndication from April 1999. McGruder pitched it as a cartoon at the same time, and between the fall of 2003 and the summer of 2004 he and producer Reginald Hudlin made a pilot for Fox that never fit network television. Adult Swim's Mike Lazzo saw it, declared it "too networky," ordered a 15-episode season and told McGruder to "just tell stories." The series premiered on November 6, 2005. McGruder put the strip on hiatus in March 2006 and never came back to it, and Universal Press Syndicate announced its cancellation.
The show followed the Freemans in the fictional, predominantly white suburb of Woodcrest: ten-year-old Huey, the family's moral compass; eight-year-old Riley, a devoted follower of gangsta rap; and Robert "Granddad" Freeman, voiced by John Witherspoon, with Gary Anthony Williams as Uncle Ruckus, the show's caricature of internalized racism. Regina King voiced both boys. McGruder's love of anime shaped the look, with Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo as touchstones for the fight scenes, and the South Korean studio Moi Animation took over the animation from season two. The theme was performed by the rapper Asheru. The commentary came from a Black left-wing perspective, taking on the response to Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War along with Black celebrity culture.
Controversy was constant. The first-season episode "Return of the King" imagined Martin Luther King Jr. waking up to scold a crowd for its apathy; Al Sharpton demanded an apology, Cartoon Network defended McGruder, and the episode went on to win a Peabody Award. Two second-season episodes critical of BET were pulled from broadcast and surfaced only on the 2008 DVD, with BET's parent Viacom having threatened legal action against Sony. The 2010 episode "Pause" skewered Tyler Perry as a cross-dressing cult leader, and Perry complained to Turner. Time listed it fifth among the most controversial cartoons of all time in 2010.
The third season was meant to be the last, but Adult Swim brought it back for a fourth in 2014, produced without McGruder after the two sides could not agree on a schedule; that season was coolly received. The run ended on June 23, 2014, after 55 episodes. Witherspoon died in October 2019, and an HBO Max reboot announced that year was shelved in 2022.
Similar items
![Video thumbnail — [Adult Swim] 2001 Pool Bumps](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/hoWcIE8VRMI/hqdefault.jpg)
Adult Swim
Cartoon Network's late-night block launched in 2001 as a joke about pool rules — and became a proving ground for surreal, irreverent animation that refused to fit anywhere else. Deadpan bumpers over footage of elderly swimmers announced shows like Aqua Teen Hunger Force and Harvey Birdman to an audience that had grown up with the network and wasn't ready to turn in.
Aqua Teen Hunger Force
Adult Swim's gleefully nonsensical cartoon about three anthropomorphic fast-food items — a milkshake, a box of fries, and a wad of meat — sharing a house in New Jersey. It made no sense on purpose, and it accidentally shut down Boston.
The Venture Bros.
Adult Swim's saga of a failed super-scientist, his two dim teenage sons, their secret-agent bodyguard Brock Samson and a butterfly-themed archnemesis who gets his arching assignments from a villains' guild. Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer's riff on Jonny Quest grew from a 2003 pilot into seven seasons of comics-nerd world-building, all of it, as Hammer put it, about "beautiful sublime failure."
Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law
The washed-up 1960s Hanna-Barbera superhero who traded crime-fighting for a law degree and spent twelve minutes a week defending Fred Flintstone, Shaggy and the rest of the Saturday-morning gang in court. Adult Swim's surreal legal sitcom premiered the night the block launched in 2001, with Stephen Colbert voicing both the deranged boss of the law firm and a paranoid prosecutor.