Before Family Guy, Seth MacFarlane Wrote For One Of Cartoon Network’s Best Shows

“Family Guy” is one of the most successful adult animated comedies of all time, following the suburban Griffin family through all kinds of wacky misadventures, and its creator Seth MacFarlane has ended up with an extensive career in comedy as a result. Once upon a time, however, he was just a writer working his way up through the ranks, learning how to put together a good cartoon comedy script. While on his way up, he worked on a beloved Cartoon Network series that would have an impact on not only MacFarlane’s career but also affect how he made “Family Guy,” and it was all about a lady-crazed himbo with a penchant for talking like an Elvis impersonator. That’s right, before MacFarlane created hits like “Family Guy” and “American Dad!,” he was a writer on the Cartoon Network classic “Johnny Bravo.”

“Johnny Bravo” was just one of the best shows during Cartoon Network’s heyday in the 2000sbut it was a pretty funny take on a certain kind of wannabe lothario and helped MacFarlane refine his skills for later projects. He worked on a handful of projects for both Cartoon Network and Disney back in the day, not only writing for “Johnny Bravo” but also “Cow & Chicken” and “Dexter’s Laboratory” for Cartoon Network and the “Ace Venture: Pet Detective” cartoon and “Jungle Cubs” for Disney. That’s quite an eclectic creative background, but it’s “Johnny Bravo” that taught MacFarlane the most.

In a 2003 interview with IGNMacFarlane spoke at length about how his early work at Cartoon Network helped him grow as a writer. He explained that timing was a big part of it, and the seven-minute “Johnny Bravo” stories forced him to be economic with his comedy:

“It was really helpful in trial and error as far as the writing process, doing script after script each week and seeing what worked and what didn’t work. It was actually great training. (…) You sort of condense – for ‘Johnny Bravo,’ we wrote scripts for seven-minute projects. We did a couple of eleven-minutes, actually, and I wrote one of those. But it was primarily a seven-minute show. It was interesting, because you’d just try to condense the traditional story piece into a smaller format.”

That brief window to tell a fully-fledged story taught MacFarlane how to make things “snappy,” and that fast-paced style of humor absolutely translated onto his own project, “Family Guy.” “Family Guy” has a tremendous number of gags and jokes packed into its 30-minute runtime (with commercials), making for a fast-paced style of comedy that’s followed MacFarlane throughout his career. Speedy joke delivery and even fast-paced dialogue have become a MacFarlane standby, not only on his animated television shows but in the movies he’s written and directed as well, like the foul-mouthed teddy bear story “Ted” and the absolutely bonkers comedy western “A Million Ways to Die in the West.”

In addition to the quick-paced style of comedy that MacFarlane clearly kept after “Johnny Bravo,” it’s also worth noting that he has a tendency to write male characters with intense sexual or “romantic” appetites. On “Johnny Bravo,” the thick-headed, muscle-bound title character (voiced by Jeff Bennett) goes ga-ga for women, but he’s pretty much incapable of sealing the deal because he’s both overzealous and kind of an idiot. It’s very tame because it was a show for kids, but you can see shades of his inability to listen to women in characters like Quagmire (voiced by MacFarlane) on “Family Guy.” While Johnny Bravo was a mostly good-natured himbo and Quagmire is a flat-out predator, there’s definitely an interesting through-line from one to the other.

It’s worth noting that there’s a kind of genuine sweetness to “Johnny Bravo” that also exists in some of MacFarlane’s work, notably his Peacock series “Ted,” which is a prequel to his film of the same name. It really seems like MacFarlane took not only the writing and comedy lessons to heart, but also continued to bring some of what made “Johnny Bravo” interesting to his other projects after.