Click here for Part 1 of Family Guy blog post.

“Animation in primetime has now become a force”, said Seth MacFarlane during the Q&A at the Family Guy evening with the cast and creators of the animated, Emmy nominated TV series. This is great news for voice actors.

The Q&A was mostly about the story lines and show gossip and less about how these voice actors got this great gig and how they developed their characters. It would have been nice to hear how they all got started. Although, Alex Borstein (Lois) talked about her career on Madtv and even gave us a little snippet of one of her characters.

But we did hear how Seth MacFarlane got “Family Guy” off the ground. He apparently had a connection with Fox. Because he’s a professional animator (that helps!) he was able to put a “very rough” storyboard together for the executives. They liked the concept and asked if he could create a pilot for $50,000. He said yes and spent the next 6 months creating it. Because he was on a low budget, he did a lot of the voices. By the way, he says, the character of Peter was based on the security guard on his college campus. The show did get canceled a couple of times but was brought back and now…the rest is animation TV series history.

-Tracy Pattin

Check out this related article from the St. Petersburg Times.