Family Guy’s Patrick Warburton says Mom hates the show and tried to cancel it

Patrick Warburton has voiced Joe Swanson on “Family Guy” since the show’s first season 25 years ago, but the role never quite met with his family’s approval. At a recent PaleyFest LA event celebrating the 25th anniversary of “Family Guy” (via People magazine), Warburton revealed that his parents hated the Seth MacFarlane-created animated comedy and their disdain for the show went so far that Warburton’s mother once tried to get ‘Family Guy’ canceled.

“They hate the show more today than they did 25 years ago,” Warburton said. “My father spent three months in a monastery. He almost became a monk. … My mother [went] when I was 13 years old, I handed out pamphlets about the sins of masturbation, [which] didn’t put me in the cool crowd. So they hate the show.

“My mother was a member of the American Television Council and they tried to get the show canceled,” Warburton continued. “I helped support my parents with ‘Family Guy’ money. She tried to get me to sign the petition [to cancel the show]. I said, “Mom, if you think I’m not going to talk about this publicly, this is the greatest irony. You are laundering money, you are laundering it for yourself.” They hate it even more today.”

“Family Guy” features the voices of Warburton, MacFarlane, Alex Borstein, Mila Kunis and Seth Green. Kunis joined the show in its second season, while the other voice actors have been with ‘Family Guy’ since the beginning.

“‘Family Guy’ is a show that has been running for 25 years,” Warburton told People at the event. ‘It’s a cartoon. It’s satire. As long as it remains relevant, current and creative, it is [will] keep going and moving.”

MacFarlane shared a similar opinion about the show’s future during an interview with the Los Angeles Times. He said he “doesn’t see a good reason to stop yet.”

“People still love it. It makes people happy and it funds a number of good causes,” MacFarlane added. “It’s a lot of money you can donate to Rainforest Trust and you can still go out for dinner that night. There was a time when I thought, ‘It’s time to get it over with.’ At this point we have reached escape velocity. I don’t know if there’s any reason to stop at this point unless it makes people sick. Unless the numbers show that people are just saying, “Eh, we don’t care about ‘Family Guy’ anymore.” But that hasn’t happened yet.”

New episodes of “Family Guy” air Wednesdays on Fox and will be available for streaming on Hulu the next day.