AllMovie

The weekly, half-hour animated series The Boondocks was based on the controversial, cutting-edge comic strip by African American artist Aaron McGruder. The heroes of the piece were the Freeman brothers, 10-year-old wannabe political activist Huey and 8-year-old aspiring "gangsta" and rapper Riley. Raised on the mean streets of inner city Chicago, Huey and Riley were in for quite a bit of culture shock when they moved to an affluent, essentially lily-white suburb, there to live with their crotchety "Grandad" Robert Freeman. Their posh new surroundings affected the youngsters' streetwise punkish not one whit, and as result most of the episodes dealt with their efforts to either "radicalize" suburbia, or to make sense of the hypocrisies and inconsistencies doled out by both the black and white communities in a post-9/11 world. Principal targets for Huey and Riley's rage and disgust were their yuppie neighbors, an interracial couple named Tom and Sarah DuBois, and their own Uncle Ruckus, who cheerfully wallowed in self-loathing and had nothing but the most derogatory things to say about the black race. While the original comic strip was unsparing in its political barbs towards everyone from George W. Bush to Jesse Jackson, the cartoon version dealt with more situational humor, though still with enough bite and vitriol to convince viewers that the iconoclastic Aaron McGruder had not sold out. Nearly two years in development, The Boondocks was originally aimed at a Fox network prime time slot, but eventually joined the Cartoon Network's late-night "Adult Swim" manifest on November 6, 2005.