Petarded

"Petarded" is the title of a fourth season episode of the animated series Family Guy. Guest starring Cloris Leachman as herself, LeVar Burton as a social worker and Gilbert Gottfried as an agent of Child Services.

The name is a portmanteau of 'Peter' and 'retarded', but also contains the word petard: as in, "to be hoisted by your own".

Plot summary

The Griffins invite the neighbors over for game night. While they are playing Trivial Pursuit, Lois gives Peter the Pre-School Edition questions to let him have his moment. After winning the game, Peter is an insufferable bore and starts talking down to everyone. Brian can't take it and challenges Peter to take an IQ test to prove he is in fact a genius. When the IQ results come back, however, it turns out that Peter is actually mentally retarded.

Peter is depressed about this until he accidentally runs over Tom Tucker. Tucker is mad until he sees that it's Peter, the retarded fellow, who ran him over and lets him go without calling the police. Peter realizes that being retarded means he can get away with all kinds of inappropriate behavior and he quickly takes advantage of his new found power. Unfortunately, while trying to steal a Frialator deep-fryer from a fast food restaurant, Peter pours hot grease all over Lois and while she is in the hospital, Child Protective Services takes the children away (much to Stewie's joy) because Peter is mentally unfit to be a parent. Cleveland takes custody of the Griffin children.

File:FGPetarded.jpg

Peter's IQ Results.

Brian tells Peter that he just has to show that he is a good parent. Peter thinks that the best way to do that is to show what a bad parent Cleveland is, so he brings a bunch of prostitutes into Cleveland's house. This doesn't work. Neither does a heartfelt plea at a hearing the next day.

Peter and Brian are at home lamenting the fact that the Griffins will never be a family again when Lois walks in. She is completely recovered and she got the kids back.

Notes

On the DVD version of this episode, right after Peter tells his friend Joe Swanson that he's retarded, there is a musical number where Joe Swanson tells the entire town, via a series of phone calls, about Peter's mental retardation. According to the DVD commentary track, Seth MacFarlane states that the musical scene (which is a parody of the song "The Telephone Hour" from the musical Bye Bye Birdie) was cut from the broadcast version of the episode due to censors objecting to the song featuring just about all of Peter's friends (including Death) singing the line "Peter is Retarded!" about twenty times as part of the song's chorus. The DVD version also has a censor option, which bleeps out the part where Brian's line, "In your fucking face, fuckwad!" to Peter (which was used for the TV versions shown on FOX and Cartoon Network).

Cultural references

• The plot of this episode strongly resembles that of the film I Am Sam, in which a mentally retarded father fights for custody of his children.
• A non sequitur sequences shows a snippet of the play The Vagina Monologues. Unlike the actual play, it shows a pair of legs with no upper body with pair of panties giving a stand-up comedy performance. The panties have a pair of eyes and a mouth with a man's voice.
• During "game night," the neighbors play Twister, Trivial Pursuit and "Two Decades of Dignity", a fictitious civil rights board game.
• After Peter shoots Quagmire, he says “Relax, Quagmire, you’re doing better than Peter Weller from the opening scene of Robocop." Instead of predictably cutting-away to a recreation of the said scene, the show cuts away to Joe, Cleveland and Mort Goldman shooting the actor.
• A cutaway shows a “National Geographic special” on fire trucks. Peter is later attacked by a fire truck outside his house at the episode's closing.
• While stalling in answering a Trivial Pursuit question, Peter arbitrarily mumbles the name of the superhero group The Fantastic Four.
• In a flashback, Peter meets Timer, “the Cheese Guy”, a character who appeared in the ABC network’s 1970s public service announcements on nutrition [1], who, somewhat ironically, is causing a Peter to stay awake at 3:30 in the morning because he is singing his signature song, which he claims to be doing because he just smoked a lot of crack.
• Brian suggests Peter take the IQ test to qualify for a MacArthur genius grant. Imagining what he would do with the money from the MacArthur grant, Peter pictures himself "buying" television actress Cloris Leachman and forcing her to juggle beanbags. Cloris Leachman voices herself in this episode.
• Instead of a calculator at his MacArthur grant test, Peter has a See 'n Say, an educational toy for young children.
• The doctor shows Peter where his test results place him in terms of intelligence. His chart shows "Retarded" below "Average", but above "Creationist." The scene is a reference to a similar scene in Forrest Gump.
• Stewie compares the way Meg clears her sinuses to that of The Odd Couple character Felix Unger.
• When Peter says, "This is the worst day of my life," Lois says, "There are plenty of people who have had worse days." The show cuts away to Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945, the day an atomic bomb was dropped on the city (which lead to the end of World War II). Although several unfortunate things happen to the person shown in the cutaway (gets a parking ticket, he gets splashed with mud by a car, and a mandrill falls from the sky, with the sound of a bomb dropping, falls on his head and attacks him), the expected atomic bombing is not one of them shown.
• A cutaway parodies the 1985 movie Mask about disfigured California teenager Rocky Dennis.
• Stewie asks Chris "Whatever happened to Geena Davis?" This episode aired a few months before Davis, an actress best known for several 1980s films, resurfaced in the television series Commander in Chief
• A cutaway parodies recent iPod commercials, with Stewie dancing in silhouette. The song in the background is the 1984 hit "The Warrior" by Scandal.
• Stewie watches the CBS Evening News. The show mocks anchor Dan Rather’s intonation, likening him to a tea kettle.
• A voiceover counts the prostitutes Peter brings to Cleveland’s house. This is a parody of a Sesame Street segment.
• One cutaway parodies the crime drama Jake and the Fatman, showing Jason "Fatman" McCabe as too sleepy and distracted by food to solve crimes.
• The song that Lois's tumor sings is to the tune of Rock Me Amadeus by Falco with all the words replaced simply with "I'm a tumor, I'm a tumor" (also published as Tech N9ne's song, "I'm a playa."
• Towards the end Chris refers to Peter as a "dangerous retard". Peter replies "Don't say retard, we prefer to be called little people." This seemingly nonsensical line refers to the Seinfeld epsiode The Stand In where George calls a little person a midget and gets a similar answer.

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