Pilot of The Cleveland Show – LEAKED!
July 2, 2009 by Wendy Boswell
Okay, so the first episode of The Cleveland Show has been leaked. You can watch it here. Here’s my notes on the episode:
– Cleveland cries to guys about losing house
– Kathleen Turner cutaway
– Bathroom scene with Cleveland Jr. on the toilet talking to Cleveland in the tub
– Peter launches rocket into house, Cleveland falls out in his tub
– Cleveland calls meeting of neighbors, says his family is moving
– inside joke at three different Family Guy episodes
– Lois and Bonnie kiss for Cleveland’s last request, and they kind of really get into it – husbands watching on the couch
– Stewie says “Goodbye chocolate people”, so does Joe
– At first, the Brown family is moving to California so Cleveland can be a minor league baseball coach
– They drive to Stoolbend, Virginia first, so Cleveland Jr. can see dad’s home town
– Visit to Stoolbend High School, and Cleveland runs into Donna, his high school sweetheart
– Flashback to their semi-date, where Cleveland almost says “I love you”
– Donna offers her spare room for the Brown family
– First look at white trash neighbors, they’re protective of Donna and the “two black guys” that are in her driveway
– First look at Rollo, who has been kicked out of school for pulling down the teacher’s pants
– Sister makes up big story as to why she ditched babysitting
– Cleveland threatens sister’s boyfriend Federline Jones to treat her right
– We meet the bear, he has a Swedish accent and smokes
– Cleveland and Donna sing “Hey Mickey” substituting their names for Mickey
– Rollo goes back to school and gets Cleveland’s help on becoming a dirty old man
– Donna asks ex-husband Robert to come back, Cleveland is shocked
– Cleveland pours out his sorrows to the neighbors he just met at the local bar
– The neighbors feel sorry for Cleveland and hatch an elaborate plan to trap Robert cheating, it does not work
– The Browns leave to go to California
– Cleveland realizes he loves Donna and turns around to tell her
– He tells off Robert, and tells Donna that he loves her
– Flashback at their lives together, and then they get married.
– Andddd…FIRST OBAMA JOKE.
So, it had a few funny moments, but nothing really THAT funny. It felt more like a typical sitcom than a Seth MacFarlane vehicle. I think that this show has about six episodes to really crank it up before it gets cancelled.
This show made me smile faintly about two times. Nothing more.
That’s beside my point though. Swedish accent? Whatever kind of American interpretation of a language the voice-actor has never actually heard that was, I’m pretty certain it wasn’t meant to sound swedish.
To further this rant, the only american cartoons I’ve watched that got the swedish pronounciation of the english language right, were Matt Groenings offspring.
Of course you can’t expect perfect imitaitons, or even more than parodies that are slightly similar to the real thing, but if the premise of a joke relies on the pronounciation of a certain word or phrase, bloody well get it right.
To round off this pointless comment and clarify what I’m referring to in the previous paragraph: the swedish equivalent of the English word ‘pie’, is ‘paj’. The pronunciation is essentially indistinguishable. The utterly funny (apparently) word ‘pee’ is phonetically identical in Swedish, only to the ‘pi’, the geometrical constant.
Cheap jokes, lost opportunities for some real linguistically based humour.
What was this about again? Oh yeah, probably not intended to be a Swedish accent.
where the hell is the episode ive not seen it yet just wondering thanks
in a previous episode they set up the swedish joke by making a remark about a swedish bakery
so it was obviously intended to be a swedish accent or at least to mock it
in summary the seth macfarlane substitue for swedish is use of the word pee for pie and doo for dough and cock for cake etc…