Larry and Steve, a prototype from What A Cartoon that eventually became Family Guy.
Examples!
- Family Guy was going to be a recurring animated sketch for Mad TV (as a competitor to Saturday Night Live's TV Funhouse cartoons), then again on The Weird Al Show (as a Spiritual Successor to The Tracey Ullman Show's Simpsons cartoons) but Seth MacFarlane decided that the show would fare better as an animated sitcom.
- FOX ran a 7-minute preview of Family Guy in 1999
, which was taken from a much earlier version of the pilot. Meg and Chris had different voices, the animation and designs were much rougher, and many color schemes were not yet finalized: Lois was a blonde, Stewie wore green overalls and a purple shirt, and Meg had a blue hat and a white shirt. Although the footage that FOX showed survived in a video rip, the rest of the preliminary pilot has never been shown. - Chris was supposed to be as fat as Peter or even fatter, but the animators decided to slim him down, claiming that Chris being so morbidly obese just looked too damn sad.
- Chris was also going to be a rather generic stoner-ish surfer-type kid. But then Seth Green turned up as the only applicant who didn't try and voice Chris with a surfer-guy accent, and his personality shifted into a simple-minded, impulsive teenager with a learning disorder instead.
- Herbert was originally going to be the school bus driver.
- The pilot pitch has a few different character design changes. While Peter and Brian look mostly the same, the other Griffins have some changes:
- Lois originally wore a red shirt with teal pants and was a blonde (which, if kept in, would have explained why Chris is a blond, instead of a redhead like Lois or a brunette like Peter and Meg).
- Meg wore a white shirt that had red stripes and her usual pink hat was blue
- Chris wore ripped shorts, walked barefoot and in some scenes wore a shirt that said: "Eighth grade friggin' sucks"
- Stewie's usual yellow shirt with red overalls was a purple shirt with green overalls
- A radio advertisement for the episode "Meet the Quagmires" featured Peter dismissing Brian's explanation of the split timeline "...as ridiculous as the theory of evolution". Whatever they had planned for the ensuing Cutaway Gag went unused, and the joke was replaced with "That's more ridiculous than the theory of why Tom Cruise runs in all of his movies," with a cutaway of Tom Cruise running to escape his closeted gay thoughts.
- For the Timer cutaway in "Petarded", the staff wanted Lennie Weinrib, the original voice of Timer to reprise his role. However, his agent said he was too old to do it and and Timer ended up being voiced by Seth MacFarlane (whose vocal impression is on-point, but still, how cool would have been to have Lennie Weinrib come back as Timer for Family Guy, a show that caters to breaking down nostalgic figures from the 1970s and 1980s for fun?).
- Originally, one of the "Text Message" options for the end of "Prick Up Your Ears" was "If you want to see Peter and Lois throw Brian out the window," instead of giving Cleveland Brown his first (and only) line of the episode. The original scene can be found on the season five DVD extra section where it features full episode animatics.
- Cree Summer was initially considered to voice Meg, but she was dropped because MacFarlane felt uncomfortable about an African-American woman playing a white character, despite Summer having done it many times in her career (Penny from Inspector Gadget and Elmyra Duff from Tiny Toon Adventures). Ironically, nearly all of the show's regular black characters were eventually played by Caucasian actors.
- William H. Macy was the original voice actor of choice for Brian.
- The Season 7 episode "Love, Blactually" had a completely different ending planned as revealed in the Volume 7 DVD animatic was far different from what happened in the final. Compared to final, Cleveland and Loretta were actually going to become a couple again and rekindle their love, with the DVD commentary hinting it went into later stages before being scrapped, as a comment mentioned Loretta was going to appear in episodes afterwards with Cleveland. Obviously, the final ending was chosen, and future episodes were rewritten to remove Loretta.
- The mayor of Quahog was originally going to be a guy with the same name as Adam West. And then the real Adam West showed up...
- The Season 8 episode "April in Quahog" was going to feature an American Dad! cold opening followed by a King of the Hill credit sequence, but were dropped due to time restraints. They were eventually used during Season 11's "Bigfat".
- Some episodes had press releases that mentioned subplots that would ultimately never be in the actual episode, usually for time reasons:
- "Peterotica": Chris becomes a genius and competes with Stewie to take over the world.
- "Brian Writes a Bestseller": Peter & Lois end up sleeping in separate beds. Said subplot though would ultimately be used the following season as the one for "Mr. and Mrs. Stewie".
- "Candy Quahog Marshmallow": Stewie begins to worry if he's becoming a redhead.
- In the DVD commentary of the episode "And Then There Were Fewer", the producers said that there was a deleted scene after Derek's death in which Jillian is revealed to be pregnant. However, since the scene was deleted, this may not be the case anymore.
- Before the show's second cancellation, around the end of the third season's production, FOX ordered five scripts to be produced in case they wanted to do more episodes (since production Season 3 had only 13 episodes) that never got made. One of those episodes was proposed for the Season 3 finale titled "Queer is Stewie", where Stewie comes out as a homosexual after a near-death experience and, after facing discrimination, goes back in time to Bible days to prevent Leviticus 18:22note from being written. It made it to the script phase, but the show's abrupt second cancellation caused the episode to not get made, and Stewie's exact sexuality is unconfirmed.
- One of the cutaway gags has a businessman telling someone else to buy stocks in waffles, causing a global chain reaction where every stock market has a huge boost in waffle stocks. Originally, the gag was going to be Peter walking into Wall Street and loudly calling for his friend Sal several times. The stock brokers would mistake the callout as "sell" and causes the entire market to plummet with mass selling of stocks. Peter would then say bye, causing everyone mishear him saying "buy" and cause the stocks to instantly regain their value.
- Another cutaway gag was a spoof of a diamond commercial where they show a man and a woman behind a shaded curtain and the man gives the woman a diamond ring. They kiss and then the woman begins to slide down before the scene immediately cuts to a black screen with text. Originally, the woman was supposed to slide all the way down out of frame and the man would tilt his head back and smile, indicating he was getting a blowjob. The censors didn't allow it and the writers had to keep fighting with them on how far the woman was allowed to slide down in the scene.
- The video game, aside from the PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable and the Xbox; there was a planned GameCube version, but it was never released. Possibly because of it's mature nature of the show or simply that the Nintendo Wii was about to be released later that year. Versions for the Nintendo DS and Game Boy Advance (possibly different games) were namedropped and a PC port more akin to the home console was considered.
