And Man said, “Like, for identifying predators and foraging for berries and stuff?”
And God said, “…Totally.”
And Man said, “Season 3 of The Boondocks was first announced in December of 2009 and began airing in May of 2010, which means it’s very conceivable that it began production contemporary with the original broadcast of K-On! season 1 (April-June 2009); indeed, this episode, ‘Lovely Ebony Brown’ (S3E11), aired only three months after the last episode of the English dub of K-On! season 1.”
That was the inspiration, wasn’t it?
I assume so, but I’ve never heard that from an official source. tbh, it felt more like appropriation or an outright ripoff, at the time. This was before anime was normalized in the US, Avatar the Last Airbender had only premiered earlier that year, so very few people had even an inkling that The Boondocks was drawing so much from it.
It’s difficult to wrap my head around how people could look at the Boondocks and not understand how much it draws from anime, but I’m of a very spoiled generation when it comes to anime access…
lol. Broadband had only become available in my area (central florida suburbs) about 4-5 years before Boondocks premiered. And one of the first things I downloaded en masse (using kazaa, scour, and maybe limewire) were the DragonBall Z episodes beyond what was available on Cartoon Network’s Toonami. (At the time they had stopped at Freiza, or vegeta. I forget.) Like, before that it was all VHS tapes. Mostly of fan dubs and subs. DVD was barely even a thing yet. Everything happened very fast for anime when broadband hit the scene. We went from having barely anything to torrents of new episodes with subs within hours of their release. All this with the backdrop of the War on “Terror” and evangelicals stirring shit up everywhere. It was a wild time, but not all much different. lol.