I was for some reason initially hesitant about Family Guy, but what really won me over was when the series started coming out on DVD after its initial cancellation by Fox. It wasn’t the best-selling first volume, though. No, that would be too simple. It was the follow-up DVD collection, when I saw an advertising one sheet with the maniacal baby of the brood, Stewie Griffin, and a bubble exclaiming, “I liked volume one so much that I made number two.” Don’t know quite what that says about me, but it was at that point that I said, “Hey, I should really check this show out.”

I did and I wasn’t disappointed. Family Guy isn’t for all tastes - it’s lewd, true, but also quite digressive, sometimes to its own detriment - yet its animated mixture of inversion (a talking dog that’s actually more central to the show than the two older children of the Griffin clan) and convention (the fat, clueless father/husband with an impossibly hot, do-everything wife) is a mostly heady one, driven by some ace joke writing and an indefatigable, rat-tat-tat style.

Family Guy Presents Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story (that’s a mouthful) is a direct-to-DVD spin-off, its title centering of course, on series breakout baby Stewie, a diabolical toddler bent on world domination. (Part of) the plot follows him as, after viewing a strange but familiar man on the tube, he sets out on a cross-country road trip looking for his real father. The title of Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story is somewhat of a misnomer since the movie in actuality is more like three episodes of the show stitched loosely together. Like the series, the movie careens 30 years into the future and back again, and other touchstones get a workout too, from musical numbers to the requisite potty humor (the word “duty” always gets an acknowledged pause and in-character laugh). A good bit of it centers around Stewie’s quest, true, but that accounts for hardly all of the movie. Viewers will likely spark to this, but only slightly more so than they would a couple of great episodes of the series. While there are some bits that are questionable as to whether they’d make the cut on network TV, this incarnation of Family Guy doesn’t turn the show into South Park or anything.

As far as extras, a gloriously dirty audio commentary track from creator Seth MacFarlane, cast members Alex Borstein (also a writer) and Seth Green and other creative participants talks some about the challenges of joke writing for an animated show, and how jokes are often swapped out at the last moment. There is also an animatic comparison that allows viewers to toggle back and forth between animated test panes and the final product. B (Movie) B- (Disc)