July 21, 2003 - Fast-paced and brutally funny, only the humor deficient wouldn't get a kick out of Family Guy.

Like The Simpsons on speed (or an animated Monty Python) the show revolved around the Griffin Family – father Peter, his wife Lois, their daughter Meg, their son Chris, and their talking dog, Brian. Oh yes – and their baby son Stewie, who is bent on world domination.

Fan support of the show pushed Family Guy to a three-season run on Fox before being cancelled, but repeats are currently enjoying massive ratings as part of Cartoon Network's nightly Adult Swim line-up, airing at 11:30PM EST.

The entire first season and the first half of the second season are available in the Family Guy: Volume 1 DVD set from Fox Home Video. Volume 2, which will finish out the series, is scheduled to be released in September.

We had a chance to talk with series creator (and voice of Peter, Stewie, and Brian) Seth MacFarlane. So what are you waiting for? Tally ho!

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IGN FILMFORCE: Am I correct in understanding that you were born in Connecticut?

SETH MACFARLANE: That's correct... I was born in Kent, Connecticut, which is a small town in northwestern Connecticut. That was 1973.

IGNFF: Did you spend your childhood in Connecticut?

MACFARLANE: I spent my entire childhood in the same town, in Kent. I went to grade school there. There was a boarding school that my mother taught at, called – appropriately enough – Kent School, that I went to. Yeah, pretty much my entire childhood was spent in that town.

IGNFF: Was it part of upscale Connecticut?

MACFARLANE: You know, at the time it was not. It was this sort of Smurf village of a town, that no one really knew was there, and it was just kind of stuck in the '50s. It's since become upscale Connecticut, because New Yorkers have found out about it, and so they started buying up houses in the town.

IGNFF: Now it's become just another suburb...

MACFARLANE: Yeah, now it's all expensive.

IGNFF: So, at that time, it was basically small town life?

MACFARLANE: Pretty much, yeah. When I was born, it was very much just a little hick town that no one knew about.

IGNFF: What was boarding school like?

MACFARLANE: It was very buttoned up. You had to wear a coat and tie every day and go to chapel three times a week, which was kind of annoying.

IGNFF: Annoying how so?

MACFARLANE: I wasn't nuts about, on 90 degree days, having to keep my coat on because it was the proper thing to do. I hear they've since progressed. I think they've actually made it into the '60s, of late.

IGNFF: From wool to cotton.

MACFARLANE: Yeah, yeah. So they've supposedly made some progress. But it was a very old-fashioned, New England boarding school.

IGNFF: At the time, did you have a sense of how the other half lived, as far as other kids in public school?

MACFARLANE: Not really. I mean, it's weird, because the elementary school that I went to was literally right across the river from this place. So it was a lot of the same kids from there went to Kent School. I didn't really have much of a sense of a different – obviously there were the kids that were there from overseas, and other places, but I didn't really have a sense of how it compared to the public school. I hadn't really seen it.

IGNFF: How buttoned down was the atmosphere, creatively, within the boarding school?

MACFARLANE: Creatively, it was probably just the opposite. They had a terrific drama department, they had a terrific art department. It was actually... it was funny... it went against the tone of the rest of the place. So, creatively, it was actually a pretty rich place.

IGNFF: Quite liberal?

MACFARLANE: Yeah, yeah. It's interesting. There's nothing liberal about the school itself, it was a very conservative place. But the art department – there were liberal people within the walls of the place who kept sort of an open mind as far as the creative end of things was concerned.

IGNFF: So it was the Kent School counterculture...

MACFARLANE: Yeah, yeah – the liberal underbelly.

IGNFF: What were your creative bents at that time? Were there any?

MACFARLANE: You know, I was doing cartoon strips for our local newspaper, and that was sort of about the extent of where I was at. I mean, I had done them, I had been drawing since I was about two, and I had made an animated film that was very, very crude in the eighth grade. I had a sense of exactly what it was I wanted to do, but it was just kind of tough. Even at that time, which was not that long ago, no one was really able to really tell me how animation worked ... It's funny, even now, not that much later, laymen are aware of how the process works. There's just so much more media now and people are just so much more aware.

IGNFF: Was it something that your parents encouraged, as far as a creative pursuit?

MACFARLANE: It was. They were ex-hippies, so they weren't forcing me to be a doctor or an accountant or anything like that.

IGNFF: Interesting that ex-hippies would put you in such a conservative school.

MACFARLANE: Yeah, it's interesting. Well, my mother worked there, so if a parent worked at a place, then you got to go for free. Otherwise, I wouldn't have been able to go – because, you know, we wouldn't have the money. We just figured, hell, take advantage of the offer.

IGNFF: Did they have any misgivings about the culture that the school represented?

MACFARLANE: Not really, not really ... It's interesting, the student body was 99% conservative Republican, but the faculty – they were all locals. My parents knew them, had known them since I was a kid. So the interesting thing is the faculty was very left-wing. So it was kind of an interesting dichotomy.

IGNFF: It's interesting that none of that would be passed along to the student body.

MACFARLANE: Right, right.