Monday, April 4, 2022

DVD/TV Series Review: American Dad: Volumes 1-4

 


American Dad is a now long-running adult animated comedy that was created by the creator of Family Guy, Seth McFarlane, who also voices multiple characters on the show, including the lead character Stan Smith. The show is set in Langly Falls Virginia and focuses on Stan's life as a CIA agent, and his family which includes his wife Francine, his son Steve, his daughter Haley, an alien named Roger, and a talking fish named Klaus. Stan saved Roger from the CIA and Klaus was a German olympian whose consciousness was transferred into a fish. So, the show does get a bit silly under the guise of the CIA covering tons of things up. In the early seasons, the show really focused on Stan's job and then tied in "side stories" that involved the other characters. Over the course of time the show gets more off the wall and usually involves Roger and his various characters (people he dresses up as to hide the fact he is an alien).

This set has the first five DVD volumes. They are not really seasons, as when the show was released on DVD in the early years, much like family guy, they did not put all the season episodes in one DVD set. For example, Volume 1 has the first 13 episodes from season one, and then Volume 2 has the rest of the season one episodes and the first nine episodes from season 2. In the early releases, the sets included a lot of extras including commentary tracks on some episodes, featurettes, deleted scenes, animatics, and the ability to watch the episodes with uncensored or censored audio. In later releases, they just released the DVDs with uncensored audio.

Overall, the show is a story-of-the-week type of show that occasionally refers back to prior episodes or events. But mostly, you don't have to have seen prior episodes to in order to get what is going on. It has a very similar comedy style as Family Guy, but it does not do as many cutaways or include as many pop culture references as Family Guy does. It is definitely not a show for kids as there is swearing and a lot of adult jokes, including many that it is surprising made it past censors when the show was on Fox. Chances are, most people reading this have an idea of what the show is and is not, but if you are just trying to figure out whether to watch the show if you like more adult humor and are not offended easily, it is worth watching, especially the early seasons which were, in my opinion, better than the later seasons are.

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