‘Family Guy’ Gets Imagined As An 80s Live-Action Sitcom By AI

Imagine a universe where, instead of Full House, people grew up in the 1980s watching Family Guy. You’ll now get an approximation of that experience, thanks to artificial intelligence.

A YouTube channel called Lyrical Realms has reimagined the long-running animated series as an 80s live-action family sitcom, and you can best believe that this version of Quahog, Rhode Island, is nestled right smack in Uncanny Valley.

400 episodes later, this is Family Guy like you’ve never seen it before. The characters—Peter, Lois, Meg, Chris, Stewie, Brian, along with supporting cast members like Glenn Quagmire, Cleveland Brown, and Joe Swanson—appear human enough to be convincing on screen. That is, if you can count. As with many AI recreations of people, our stars are blessed with too many fingers and too many pearly-whites.

Dreamed up with Midjourney, the faux opening title includes a few pop-culture gems for the fans, including Ernie the Giant Chicken, who is interpreted by the AI model as a guy in a chicken suit. The video is set to As Days Go By, the theme song of 1980s sitcom Family Matters.

The AI-assisted fan remake has now amassed millions of views on YouTube. Viewers are loving the hyperrealism, with some noting that the humanlike actors look just like how they have imagined the characters to appear in real life.

A few have pointed out that the scenes of live-action Stewie and Brian bear resemblance to the duo’s real-life selves in the Road to the Multiverse episode, where the toddler and dog visited alternate universes and saw themselves in Disney-fied and The Flintstones-like forms, among others.

“I don’t know what’s more impressive,” a viewer on YouTube lauds. “The reality of all the characters… or that they could count to 25 with their hands.”

You can check out more conceptual clips like this one on Lyrical Realms’ YouTube channel. The creator regularly churns out music videos “illustrated by AI,” in which every line is captured with AI-generated artwork.

[via We Got This Covered and UNILAD, video and screenshots by Lyrical Realms and featured with permission]