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| Peter Lowenbrau Griffin | |
|---|---|
| Homeworld | Earth |
| Species | Human |
| Gender | Male |
| Height | 5 ft 10 in (1.78 m) |
| Weight | 298 pounds |
| Age | 42 (as of Season 3 episode "Brian Does Hollywood") |
| Vehicles | Fishing boat S.S. More Powerful Than Superman, Batman, Spiderman, And The Incredible Hulk Put Together, The HindenPeter, a blimp similar to the Hindenburg, the PeterCopter, a helicopter, both resembling Peter's head and subsequently ruined his neighbor's yard, and an old fashioned propellor airplane (used in a challenge to race Lois around the world). |
| Favorite beer | Pawtucket Patriot Ale |
| Religion | Catholic |
| Heritage | Irish/African |
| Favorite Band | KISS |
| Favorite Sports Team | Boston Red Sox |
| Least Favorite Sports Team | New York Yankees |
Peter Lowenbrau Griffin is a fictional character in the Fox animated television show Family Guy. He is voiced by the show's creator and lead writer, Seth MacFarlane. Peter is the head of the Griffin household and the central character in the show. He is married to Lois, and father of Meg, Chris, and Stewie. His best friend is his dog Brian.
Peter initially worked as a production line worker at the Happy-Go-Lucky Toy Factory. Following its closure he became a fisherman. He has also worked as a Renaissance Fair jouster, Sheriff, CEO, and folk singer. His favorite pastime is watching television.
In the episode "Peter Griffin, Husband, Father... Brother?", Peter discovered he had a pre-Civil War era black ancestor named Nate Griffin. Furthermore, he was a slave owned by a Pewterschmidt (Lois's Family) ancestor. His father-in-law paid Peter $20,000 in reparations, which Peter then stupidly squandered turning his house's den into a replica of Pee-wee's Playhouse. He later realized this was a very ridiculous and childish mistake, and gave his money freely to the people of Quahog.
In an earlier episode, "The Son Also Draws", Peter claimed to be Native American, with an ancestor named Jeep Grand Cherokee in order to regain Lois' gambling losses at a casino. The casino managers told Peter to go on a vision quest to prove his claim. Peter did, and his spirit guide turned out to be Fonzie.
When a toad-licking drug trend started at Meg's school, Peter went "undercover" as a Fonzie-inspired character called Lando Griffin, and nobody questioned his assumed identity as a high school student not related to Meg. Meg was at first mortified, but when Lando became cool by single-handedly turning the entire school off of drugs, Meg asked him to the dance. Lando took Connie D'Amico to the dance instead, but declared that he had been rejected by Meg, and promised to kill himself by driving his motorcycle off a cliff. According to the news anchor the next morning, "Police were baffled when no body was found, but they decided to let it go and let people get on with their lives."
Peter is insanely jealous of Lois' ex-boyfriends, and he will attack any man who expresses the slightest interest in her (he even punched an orca after it "kissed" Lois). One notable exception is when he learned Lois had been sexually involved with Gene Simmons, a member of his favorite band, KISS; needless to say, he was proud of her, boasting "My wife did KISS!"
Peter is often transformed by traumatic experience, and then restored to "normal" by a simple, almost trivial experience. For example, after shock therapy administered by Brian, Peter became like a wealthy, snobbish socialite and bid too much money at an auction. To snap Peter back to reality and his "normal" self, Brian broke one of Peter's Star Wars collectibles during a speech paraphrased from George Lucas' film The Empire Strikes Back. He also loves Boba Fett from the same set of films.
Peter also has a recurring arch-enemy in a man-sized chicken who gave him a worthless coupon. He fought him throughout Rhode Island in the episode "DaBoom", and again in "Blind Ambition".
We find another example of Peter's malleable persona in the episode "I am Peter, Hear Me Roar". After experiencing a pain as great as that of childbirth ("stretching your bottom lip to the back of your neck") at a women's retreat, Peter became extremely sensitive to the point of his son proclaiming "Holy crap, Dad's a chick," which then quickly escalated to an exaggerated portrayal of radical feminism, accompanied by delusions. To bring him back, Lois ended up in a fight with another woman, one Gloria Ironbox, restoring Peter in an ironic fashion through a "typical male fantasy" involving a catfight.
Physically, Peter is in very good health (despite being overweight and accident-prone). A lump in his chest turned out to be a fatty corpuscle, not cancer. However, he does occasionally suffer from incontinence at socially awkward moments and premature ejaculation with his wife. Peter's fertility was lowered (perhaps only temporarily) when Stewie went in a microscopic ship into Peter's body and destroyed several of Peter's sperm (in the episode "Emission Impossible"). Excessive consumption of alcohol has damaged most of his brain cells, and may be the explanation for his mental retardation, which was discovered in the episode "Petarded". Despite earning the 1965 trophy for Most Ticks, Peter does not appear to have suffered Lyme disease or related ailments.
In one episode, "Blind Ambition", Peter went blind after eating nickels; he said he was aiming for the world record of the most nickels swallowed. However, he became a hero, saving the owner of the Drunken Clam from dying in a fire. Afterwards, a dead hobo's eyes were donated to him.
Although capable of deductive reasoning, it sometimes takes Peter a long time to draw simple conclusions. For example, after watching an ad for the KISS-stock tour passing thru New England, it wasn't until the next day while at the dentist that he figured out that he could go to KISS-stock. On another occasion, it took him three days to figure out a single-panel cartoon in The New Yorker. Peter lacks some very basic general knowledge (for a long time he thought dogs laid eggs) but his knowledge of some topics, including TV shows and KISS, is nearly encyclopedic.
When Peter appeared on Diane Simmons's talk show, an onscreen title described him as an "embarrassing fat moron." Being stupid, lazy, impulsive, aggressive and misogynistic, Peter's sole redeeming quality appears to be his loyalty; despite his nearly all-encompassing faults he is a loyal family man and a loyal friend.
Peter is apparently a very capable musician in several different areas. In the episode "Wasted Talent," Peter was revealed to be a concert-level pianist, but only when inebriated. He was also part of a barbershop quartet which sang at hospitals, delivering bad news to terminally ill patients. He was part of an a cappella quartet named The Four Peters, which consisted of Griffin and three men who looked exactly like him.
Comparing Peter to other cartoon fathers
In an interview in the August 2005 issue of Blender, series creator Seth Macfarlane acknowledges Ralph Kramden as a primary inspiration for Peter Griffin, but accepts as "inevitable" comparisons to Homer Simpson.
Peter compared to The Simpsons' Homer Simpson (Bumbling Buffoon type)
Because Peter Griffin is such a lazy, fat and stupid character who heads a household consisting of a level-headed mother, (comparatively) intelligent daughter, under-achieving son, and a baby, comparisons to Homer Simpson are inevitable. In The Simpsons episode Treehouse of Horror XIII, Peter Griffin is shown amongst a crowd of Homer Simpson's clones, implying that the Simpsons creators believe Peter to be a clone of Homer. Unlike Homer, whose destructive acts are played as the result of ineptitude or (more frequently) ignorance, Peter's are just as frequently willful as unintentional. Indeed, Peter has an unerring talent for finding and executing the most damaging possible solution to any given situation.
Both Peter and Homer display occasional effeminate tendencies but react with fear or anger when they see such tendencies or signs of tendencies in their firstborn sons. In the episode "The Son Also Draws", Chris gets advice from Meg on how to tell Peter that he does not want to be in the Boy Scouts anymore. Meg said that whenever she doesn't want to hurt Peter with bad news, she sits on his lap, snuggles up to him, and gives him a kiss on the cheek. Chris tries this, and Peter calmly gets up with a blank look affixed to his face, and tells Chris they will never speak of the incident again.
Peter is not violent towards Chris in the way that Homer is towards Bart, though he can at times be callous, as evidenced in the episode "He's Too Sexy For His Fat." In this episode Peter gets liposuction accompanied by radical plastic surgery (such as rhinoplasty, pectoral and gluteal augmentation, among other procedures), and then neglects Chris in specific and his family in general, viewing them as inferior.
The fathers of both Peter and Homer were indifferent to them as children, but their attitudes towards their fathers as adults are quite different. Homer dumped his father off at a retirement home, happy to forget him, while Peter insisted that his father come live with him after retiring (in the episode "Holy Crap"). Peter is eager for his father's approval, while Homer is not. It is interesting to note, however, that Peter's father appeared only in that one episode, whereas Homer's father, despite his supposedly inverse attitude, appears as a regularly recurring character.
Their relationships to their wives' families are not very good; both character's in-laws frown on the marriages, because the husbands are fat, lazy, and incompetent slobs. For Homer, Marge's sisters Patty and Selma (who are regular characters as well) frequently demonstrate their dislike for Homer, although it has also been shown that Marge's mother Jackie and her now-deceased father have also disliked Homer. For Peter, Lois's wealthy parents Carter and Barbara Pewterschmidt are shown having a strong dislike for Peter (although both of them are minor recurring characters) and one unique comparison to this is that they hope that the marriage will end in divorce.
While both Peter and Homer occasionally indulge in casual blasphemy, Peter generally comes across as much more casual towards religion and its institutions, reacting to such things with none of the reflexive respect to religious symbolism, language, and iconography that the adherents to those religions would normally expect. (The show itself also shows God, which is not allowed by the Ten Commandments.) For example, in the episode "Holy Crap", Peter decides that the best way to fix his relationship with his father is by kidnapping the Pope, as his father is a devout Catholic. This personality trait of Peter's is mirrored in the tone of the series, as the jokes and humorous situations involving the ridicule of religion and its representatives are numerous.
Both Peter and Homer have hosted birds in their house at one time or another, Peter hosting a white-rumped swallow in his beard and later the three fledglings ("Brian Wallows, Peter's Swallows"), and Homer hosting a flock (murder) of crows. Both Peter and Homer have put up with bothersome endangered animals, Peter with the aforementioned white-rumped swallows and Homer with the screamapillar.
Their love of beer is astounding, but Peter is arguably the heavier drinker. In the beginning of the episode "Wasted Talent", Peter tried to find a "Silver Scroll" (a parody of Willy Wonka's Golden Tickets from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) in Pawtucket Pat beer bottles. He drank continuously for an entire evening. By the morning, the living was strewn with beer bottles 3 or 4 layers thick. At the end of the episode, the show joked that Peter had only one brain cell left.
Peter displays dense packets of knowledge on unexpected topics, although not quite as often as Homer. Advising his son about women, Peter said that women are from Venus, then proceeded to list the chemical composition of the planet.
Peter compared to King of the Hill's Hank Hill (Running Joke type)
Comparing Peter to Hank Hill is tenuous, though there are a few points of similarity. Both Peter and Hank have a human best friend who lusts after their wife (Bill Dauterive makes himself a simulacrum of Peggy Hill, while Quagmire gets Chris to bring him Lois's hairbrush so he can add real hair to his simulacrum of Lois). Both of them show pride in their particular obscure region of the U.S.; whether such pride is justifiable is a matter for debate.
In the episode "One If By Clam, Two If By Sea", Peter, Quagmire, Joe Swanson, and Cleveland stand in a line, saying "Yup... yup... yup... mm-mmmm" in the same manner as Hank, Bill, Dale Gribble, and Boomhauer. There is a similar scene in The Simpsons when their house is being fumigated, however, so this may simply be a running joke among animated shows on FOX.
Both have pet dogs who they love as part of their families and care for (although Brian can basically care for himself). While Hank may only have one biological son, his niece, Luanne, lives with him for most of the series and is almost like a daughter to him. Both Bobby and Chris are overweight, and Meg and Luanne both have boy troubles, although Luanne isn't as troubled as Meg usually is. Both Peter and Hank's fathers have not been as loving as they would have liked, and Hank, unlike Peter, does not enjoy the company of his father. Peter Griffin is often considered a stereotypical example of a typical native Rhode Islander, and Hank is considered a stereotypical native Texan.
Peter compared to American Dad's Stan Smith (Family types)
Because both Family Guy and American Dad are made by McFarlane, a comparision of the two is only natural. The families are strikingly similar, both featuring a daughter with a younger brother, and a talking pet. However, there are many differences, mainly that Peter is lazy and overweight, while Stan is paranoid and only slightly overweight.
Peter compared to other cartoon fathers
Like Dagwood of Blondie, Peter has a lot of oddball ancestors, such as Angus Griffin, who invented golf, and Huck Griffin, who rafted down the Mississippi with "N-word Jim." Like Dagwood, Peter married a woman of a different economic class. Though both Peter and Dagwood eat a lot, Dagwood isn't overweight.