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LOS ANGELES: “Family Guy” creator Seth MacFarlane condemned Tuesday a doctored online clip of the show depicting its star using a cellphone to trigger explosions at the Boston marathon. The fake clip was based on scenes from an episode of the cult animated series which aired last month, and which was pulled by broadcaster Fox from online service Hulu.com because of sensitivity after Monday's blasts.
“The edited Family Guy clip currently circulating is abhorrent. The event was a crime and a tragedy, and my thoughts are with the victims,” MacFarlane said on his Twitter feed.
In the fake clip, the show's main character Peter Griffin is shown using a cellphone to trigger two explosions, accompanied by screams, to win the world-famous marathon.The full real episode, entitled “Turban Cowboys” and broadcast last month, involves Peter Griffin becoming a Muslim and discovering he is part of a terrorist plot to blow up a bridge, according to the IMDb industry website.
The episode was pulled Tuesday from the fox.com and hulu.com services, on which old episodes can be viewed, a spokeswoman for Fox told AFP.
She said the decision was separate from the controversy over the fake clip, and was in line with decisions Fox and other broadcasters regularly take when fictional stories inadvertently conflict with tragic real-life events.Past examples of this have involved the rescheduling of episodes of “Family Guy” and “American Dad” due to last December's Sandy Hook school shooting which killed 20 young children in Newtown, Connecticut.
The fake “Family Guy” clip and theory were first posted by conspiracy-theorizing talk radio host Alex Jones' website InfoWars.com, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Its founder tweeted shortly after Monday's bombing that he suspected the attack was a “false flag” operation perpetrated by the US government, the newspaper said.
